BOOKS AT THE MILLENNIUM : Have they a future?

Although there are many who argue cogently that the new millennium begins on January 1, 2001 rather than on January 1, 2000, their arguments are being overwhelmed by the proliferation of current millennial celebrations and observances.

One of the earliest of these, in fact, was held on October 17, 1998, by Washington's Cosmos Club members, a symposium on "The Book: Past, Present, and Future," planned as the first of a series of such millennial observances. Why study the book? One of the best reasons given is the important role books have played in achieving and detecting continuity in a culture. The symposium began with a definition of the book and continued with its history.

A book is defined in the terms of symposium speaker Bernard Knox as a "portable object recording a text that can be easily read by anyone with an elementary education and can be reproduced in identical form in multiple copies." As such, the book has been around since the first centuries of the first millennium, initially in the form of papyrus scrolls, but, by the end of the second century, in the form of papyrus pages stitched together and called a codex by the Romans. (A codex is our form of the book.)

The great literatures of Greece and Rome were recorded and circulated on papyrus scrolls. According to Knox, the famous library at Alexandria had eight scrolls of the poems of Sappho of Lesbos, scrolls of the Homeric poems, and 250 of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. As evidence that the Athenian society took books and reading for granted, Knox quotes Aristophanes who had the chorus assure the audience of one of his comedies: "Everyone is holding his little book so he can follow the subtle allusions." He notes that Martial speaks of the bookshops of Rome and that Augustus founded libraries to hold the "enormous literary and philosophical heritage of Greco-Roman civilization."

Papyrus is perishable and much of this literature was lost as centuries went by and ancient literature was transferred to parchment and vellum, more durable but much more expensive material and as such available only to an elite. Because of this and the barbarian invasions, only a selection of these classics survived by the time of the Renaissance. But that selection is the foundation of the literature known to us in the West today.

Although the second speaker at the symposium, Soren Edgren, University of Stockholm Sinologist, described an East Asian book culture that produced paper and printing several centuries before they were known in the West, his information is but a side issue when considering the continuity of our own culture. The chief connection is the emergence of paper in China and its arrival in the West via the high Arabic culture of southern Spain. As Knox had pointed out, paper-as the material for the new invention of the printing press-added to portability and legibility an affordability that made books available to a wide audience undreamed of in earlier centuries.

No matter what their affordability, however, possessing books depended on their distribution. Symposium speaker Calhoun Winton pointed out that distribution was a real problem for our early settlers, some of whom, according to a seventeenth-century Maryland clergyman, were "addicted to reading." In earliest colonial times, settlers brought books in their luggage, ordered them from elsewhere, or were sent them by persons or organizations in the Old World. Obviously they valued them. Winton told the charming story of a minor planter, Robert Cole, who, before he returned to England on family business, left a will and inventory of his possessions for the benefit of his seven children, should he not survive. In the inventory he listed "Seaven books in a chest, six other books left out for children to read...." He did not survive, but his children grew up literate among those books.

Charles Carroll of Carrollton, signer of the Declaration of Independence, when reading law in London, had his father send him his grandfather's law library, and presumably took the library back when he returned to Maryland. Thus these treasured books crossed the Atlantic three times. Carroll continued to order books from London and sternly advised his agent, who joked about the size of his bill, "Money cannot be laid out better, in my opinion, than in the purchase of valuable books."

Evidently his fellow colonists agreed. Winton notes that shipments from Britain were recorded in weight, and that during the 1760s, the port of Annapolis in any given year was receiving thousands of pounds of books. Gradually, of course, the colonies developed printing and publishing of their own.

Today that printing and publishing has grown into a huge industry. Book agent Deborah Grovenor told the symposium that people are buying more books than ever, and spending more on them than on competing media. And, since only about one percent of these books are best sellers, it is clear that a lot of books get published that were not intended to be best sellers. In addition, new small publishing houses and some university presses are seeing to it that "intelligent, worthy books" not big enough for big publishers will still be available to many readers interested in them.

This is astonishingly good news for those of us who have worried that the book is disappearing. Literary journalist Michael Dirda was not alone when he wrote (Washington Post Book World, October 3, 1999), "I am genuinely worried. Who will read the books I cherish? Who will keep alive the writers I revere?" There are hundreds worrying, too, most of them about the effects of technology on the future of the book.

Kenneth Arnold, president of New Century Communications, which provides electronic support for nonprofit and educational organizations, has an answer for us. "I think the community of the book, which is the printed book..., is a very real community. The on-line community participates in the community of the book, grows out of it, is used to distribute books, and yet adds something new to it in terms of immediacy, connectivity, linkage to other books and ideas, bringing into play items that you ordinarily wouldn't have access to, and bringing into the conversation people in other parts of the world and other cultures that ordinarily you wouldn't have access to."

That may be so but let the emphasis be on "the community of the book." Nothing can replace it. This is what Robert Barnett, chair of the Library Committee at the Cosmos Club, was saying when he introduced the symposium. "Books are special....All kinds of bad things have happened to books over the ages, but they have survived. They have done so because they represent knowledge, they represent adventure, they represent fantasy, pathos, drama, humor, solace, intellectual challenge. They communicate person to person. They touch all the emotions we have."

They are certainly worth our consideration as we review the past millennium and look to the future.