Solace in the written word

Not only Webster but most of us are much possessed by death. Even if we don’t see the skull beneath the skin, we enjoy the thought that it’s there and look forward to the day when it will turn to dust so that we can sing its bygone glories.

Notoriously, the ancient Anglo-Saxons allowed their Roman buildings to fall into ruin and then wrote elegies to mourn their passing. The rise of Greek cities left the countryside to languish outside its walls and gave birth to bucolic poetry. Trains and planes proclaimed the end of parochialism and allowed for the rebirth of patriotism.

Likewise with new technologies. Photography proclaimed the death of painting, before the birth of Picasso and Jackson Pollock. Cinema announced that theatre was a thing of the past, though Brecht and Beckett were still to come. And when Gutenberg’s printing press decreed the end of the manuscript book, there sprung up a sudden passion for calligraphy, and calligraphy handbooks became early 16th-century bestsellers. Our death wishes are highly suspect.

It is therefore hardly surprising that in this age of the electronic text, which repeatedly proclaims the death of the printed book, there should be an outpouring of books on its courageous survival, on the role of the persistent reader and on our recalcitrant libraries. Bookworms appear to be crawling out from under every electronic gadget, and not a day goes by without someone, somewhere, announcing to a less than surprised world that the printed word’s pulse is still beating. Even Bill Gates, virtuality’s virtuoso, brought out his apocalyptic book on the end of paper on paper, a gesture which seemed to lack the strength of its proclaimed convictions. Now two huge compendiums have been added to the flood. One is a splendid and erudite achievement, ambitiously conceived and intelligently executed.