futureofthebook.com

October 4, 2001

Nine eleven is becoming a title of a book rather than an event. More events will follow, but the act of ìbreathing the deadî, as Richard Minsky did in the smoke pawl on Bleeker Street, is now ending.

Meanwhile the stereotype roles of the political parties have been reversed as Republicans begin to ìtax and spendî. Evidentially Republicans have also become activists for international world peace and social support at home while Democrats man the barricades of patriotism, law & order and diminished support for education. A whole new middle, or a complex of interwoven responses, is now apparent.

Nine eleven is becoming more of a mythical story rather than the news. An Islamic conquest of a Holy City of different values and a following crusade between economies and ideologies to secure themselves as agendas for government. This story has an aura of scripture revised or great service books rewritten without reference to an exemplar. In the future, only libraries themselves will make sense.

the last word

For a conclusive perspective on nine-eleven read about Rudolph Giuliani at the United Nations
website left over from a conference on the future of the page is loaded with wonderful essays and insights into the
haptic attributes of the physical page.

“Architectures, Ideologies & Materials of the Page” was presented at Body Projects II: Digital Matter, Digital Memory, a conference organized by the Humanities Research Unit at the University of Saskatchewan (19-20 March 1999).

bookbinding & reading

There is not that much difference between sewing a book and reading a book. Both involve maintaining a tension. There is also the manipulation of pages related to the manipulations of mind. Finally there is a covering that relates one book with another. Is there meaning in these coincidental qualities?
(continued)

evolution of aim

Frank Wison discusses the scenario of human evolution that focuses on the hands prompting the mind. Are projected ideas related to thrown stones?
(see e-essay)

“Intelligent” hand use might not be merely an incidental bequest of our hominid heritage, but–along with the language instinct–an elemental force in the genesis of what we refer to as the “mind,” activated at the time of birth.

Is the physical book a mediator between the manipulations of hands and the manipulations of the mind? Just tossing out an idea.
(see e-essay)

multiplicity of modes

Princeton University’s endowed professor of European History,
Robert Darnton offered a presentation E-BOOKS AND OLD BOOKS:
PUBLISHING AND THE BOOK TRADE FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE INTERNET at the Indiana University. The lecture is based on Darnton’s
Presidential Address for the American Historical Association which
appeared as an e-article in a website created by Jian Liu, Indiana University Reference
Librarian. The title of that article is “An Early Information Society:
News
and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” and to get an idea of
the possibilities of e-books you might consult that website at:
http://www.indiana.edu/~ahr/darnton/ (from Rachel Lapkin)

annotated links

Here is an excellent
resource guide to library preservation and conservation from the Patchogue-Medford Library. Explore the other important community information resources as well. This is a mighty library!

media and meaning

So far I have heard no mention of the role of the book in the attack and response events. But of course it must be an inconsequential role, too silly even to mention. Certainly the influence of images, pure and simple, is far more awesome.
(continued)

new item at the FotB store

Shanna Leino is now providing a series of cut brass tools for blind finishing of traditional sewn board bookbindings. These tools are adapted to work on Ethiopian, Greek and Armenian designs. They are jewelery standard work and produce astounding sharpness and brightness. The Future of the Book Gift Shop

September 20, 2001

Monday the 10th of September was my 60th birthday and I mentioned that I was ready to relive the 60ís. Well, that seems to be occurring. Today we had a University wide convocation to discuss the options for response to the events of the 11th and at the end of the presentations, people from the audience got up to offer comments. The last person was a tall man. He said; ìI am a native Iowan and ex-military, special forces, and I have just one thing to say about what happened.î You could sense the audience preparing for some kind of rage.

Then he said simply; ìWe deserved it.î He continued; ìThis country was founded by terrorists. The first colonists would have starved but for the help of the Indians. In turn we exterminated them. And to this day we are known in many regions of the world as terrorist forces.î

ìNow we have a chance to repair our image and I am thinking about the responses of the 60ís. But we need to go beyond that and not be dismissed as an ìantiî war movement. We should not let the response be labeled anti war because that would give a secure position to the war movement which already has the momentum. Now we must start a constructive peace movement.î

EndNote: My brother, also ex-military, also made an interesting comment; “If we do nothing, we will be attacked again. If we respond, we will also be attacked again.”

its the reading modes, stupid

Wayne Weigand, University of Wisconsin, gave us an afternoon lecture on the library as a place. He wants to shift the attention of the library profession to focus on the library as a place for reading, for social interaction and for the building and exchange of social capital.

It was a great lecture. Wayne says the library role in mediating debate and organizing reasoned social reponse can be strategic. When someone asked if the other public forums of, say broadcast services or TV talk shows don’t have a more apparent influence, he responded in an interesting way.

Yes, he said, the televised images of an attack on the Trade Towers have a more dramatic, widespread influence but they may not mean as much as the reasoned and elaborated understandings of the events that will appear as books. And, Wayne said, it is not particularly apparent that the less dramatic behaviors of reading, across all the modes of reading, don’t provide more potent understanding and insight.

Further, he said, librarians can prove this latent fact by a focus on all the behaviors of reading. The library can be the place where reading modes are defined, refined and brought to bear on complex issues. Moreover, libraries transcend disciplines and polarizied positions. Libraries are the perfect place for effective public debate.

And, communities use libraries. Did you know that library attendance is three times greater than movie attendance? Libraries are an invisible infrastructure of social fabric.

its the economy, stupid

Is the attack collapsing our economy? If it is we should defend ourselves. Enterprise, cooperative response, resolve and hard work.

Forget the miliitary response. That will only engender more attacks, no matter who is calling who “evil”. Besides, we cannot afford military response at the moment. Anyone want to invest in the enterprise of bombing the mountains of Afghanistan?

Better to invest our remaining resources in better cockput doors. The perception of safe air travel is worth more to our economy than the bombing of the mountains of Afghanistan.

Incidentally, the money spent on one mission to bomb the mountains of Afghanistan would rebuild a strategic network of rail mail and passenger services in the US. Such a network could have buffered our economy last week or in the event of any other distruption in air service. Our national security depends not only on capacity for response, but on redundancy and the resiliance of our infrastructure.

***“love is not pretty”

This last line in a poem told of the burden of each of our dealings with the last week. A teacher came up to me and said that she could not have gotten through the last week without the
help that Craig provided every day. For a moment I wondered why she didn’t say so in an email, but then a second later I understood.

September 14, 2001

If we are going to ìwhipî terrorism, we better have something more appealing to substitute in its place. Otherwise, thousands of other displaced and desperate characters, armed only with knives and paper cutters, will continue to destroy nations and economies on a whim. I donít think exporting our affluence will do it; that would only destroy the planet. It needs to be a motivation equivalent to that which can transform paper cutters into the strategic military technology of the 21st century.

I went ot the University memorial service today. It was a massive crowd, but somehow I got the last seat in the front row. It was certainly a momentous occasion with speakers from every persuasion and ethnicity offering their own versions of rationality and recovery. Up in front I was interested to see that most speakers came to the platform with some kind of book in their hand and it was always a small book. In the circumstance I thought that those hand held books represented a strategic technology as well. Those books may even be the devise that transforms the others.

As the collapsing towers came down almost astrophysical forces were set off. All the energy stored in each ton of raised steel and fabric and interior of the buildings was suddenly released. Everything was pulverized and combusted except 8 1/5î x 11î sheets of paper from office archives. These archives floated down all over lower Manhattan. They were meaningless, but they could be picked up and interpreted and given a different meaning.

September 12, 2001

The response to destruction is resilience, pure and simple. Resilience is an act of counter terrorism. We do not have the simple option of sectarian violence. In a medieval time the engine of a warring crusade was more realistic. Today we are too intermingled.

The danger is that the rich can be isolated from the poor and the ìfirstî world can war with the ìthirdî. To deflect one affluent society from warring with others less affluent the resources of societies should be stocked to another engine of constructive rebuilding everywhere.

September 11, 2001

Imaginary fears, imaginary cataclysm, fear of sharks, fear of collapse of huge structures or disturbing imaginations of air crashes are sometimes so vivid that they cannot be inventions. Perhaps they resonate the actual experience of living inside the churn of history. Or the disturbing real dream of walking endlessly across the ruins of a city absorbed in details of unexplainable sounds and smells.

Tonight we decided to continue our Ethiopian bindings. Blind tooling, bizarre plaited endbands, scalloped leather hinges and doublure insets of brocade or mirror. No disturbing imagination involved, just comforting continuity from one culture to the next and from one time to another. Books seem to do that. Even at the end of the world, we will still be here, making books in Iowa.

*** its the 60’s all over again

My 60th birthday
party!