Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. –P.J. O’Rourke

This year, my mom gave me a book cover made from fabric for one of my birthday presents. It said “travel-reading” (or something along those lines) on the front; it felt nice and squishy compared to the average binding and was generally a nice way to accessorise the book I had asked for in the first place.

Come to think about it, I couldn’t help but associate travel-reading with

a)    reading mind-numbing trash (because who can be bothered with Foucault when frying in the sun?); or

b)    reading something without being judged by others. 

Chances are that travel will lead you some place where nobody speaks your language, so might as well whip out anything your heart desires. And with the squishy book cover, nobody will ever know what lies beyond the purple fabric anyway.

People always say to not judge a book by its cover. However, we usually aremore than happy to judge our fellow human beings by the cover of the book they’re reading. Self-help book? – Wow, they must have ISSUES. Poetry? – Must be a daydreamer. Cheesy romantic novel? – Desperate housewife for sure. Consequently, anytime I visit someone’s house or room for the first time, my eyes inevitably roam the bookshelves –you are what you read, right?

Late last year, Japan’s literary scene was put in a flurry. A list of books borrowed from a High School library by Haruki Murakami, award-winning and best-selling author in Japan and internationally, had been published.[1] While the newspaper that published the list argued that information on literary celebrity Murakami’s reading were clearly in the interest of the general public, others countered that people should never have to fear that their reading habits will be publicized.

In Murakami’s case, one of the more “sexually frank” titles included Joseph Kessel’s Belle de Jour, a tale of a housewife gone prostitute. Clearly, Murakami would be judged for his reading. To make things worse, his teenage reading. The squishy cover of privacy was removed from all the books he had read, or even just borrowed, decades ago.

Embarrassing, right? Well, I don’t think so. I believe that what we read, particularly while growing up, can change and influence us. It could turn us into better people – it could, however, also not change us in the slightest. Who can claim to have read every book he or she ever started cover to cover? Sometimes we give up on books, we learn that we don’t like them, that we disagree with their message or style.

With Murakami, nobody knows whether or not he even read Belle de Jour. He might as well have used it as a door stopper for 4 weeks and returned it, unread and unchanged.

Of course privacy in general is something that we give up, sometimes deliberately and sometimes without even noticing, on a day-to-day basis. In times of “anti-terror-surveillance”, who is to say that your private reading list is not suddenly in the public interest? With the Patriot Act in place, for example, borrowing a Quran and standard works on chemistry from a US library might already put an end to your private reading.

With the squishy book-cover, however, you can at least be sure to keep the person sitting opposite you on the train in the dark about you re-reading 50 Shades of Grey for the 49^th time.

How would you feel if your life’s library records were on display for everyone to see?

Have you ever felt judged for a book you read?

[1] http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-haruki-murakami-library-books-20151202-story.html

To Read or Not to Read, that is the question (Alternate title: WTF George?)

Whenever there is a choice of either reading the book or watching the on-screen adaptation, I tend to prefer reading the book and let imagination build my own creative world. However, when I first started watching the TV series Game of Thrones I had to reconsider this aim. First of all, I hadn’t really heard much about the novel series by George R.R. Martin, A Song of Fire and Ice. Second, as I had come across the TV series first, I really saw no need to read the novel afterwards. However, after watching series 1-3, I had grown too impatient to wait another 9 months for the series 4 to premier. Therefore, I decided to go to our local bookstore and buy the actual  volumes that were meant to tie in with the latest on-screen events. But while reading A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, I became more and more disappointed with the books. Neither Martin’s writing style nor his language appealed to me. Somehow I had expected the novels to be written in more refined style, using the various devices of the English language to enhance the thick and complex plot-lines. Furthermore, I was really annoyed to find out that the actual books differed considerably from the TV series. For one, there were storylines in the novel concerning characters that didn’t even appear in the screen adaptation. In other cases, the storylines concerning characters that were both in the book and in the TV series were changed so much, that they didn’t relate any more (e.g. in the case of Sansa Stark/Alayne)[1].

George R.R. Martin. Look at his smug face.

For obvious reasons our perception of literature differs individually. So too does our preference for film adaptations. If we look at various books and their screen adaptations, e.g. Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, John Buchan’s Thirty-Nine Steps, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, John LeCarré’s The Constant Gardener etc. there is plenty of room for agreement or disagreement, approval or disappointment. Naturally, there will be readers claiming the book to be better, while others prefer the screen adaptation. Our individual perception will always differ in one way or another from that of others, e.g. from that of film directors or scriptwriters. Consequently, this difference in individual interpretation or even criticism can also lead to disappointment. (I am still wondering whether I should watch the screen adaptation of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman or not.)

Coming back to the Game of Thrones series, the initial reason why I started reading the books was so that I could follow up the storylines without having to wait for the launch of the next part of the TV series. Though the experience of reading Martin’s novels influenced my view of both the TV series and the book series considerably. Due to the high amount of contextual disagreements, the mutilation of storylines and the lack of refined language, I started judging both versions negatively. My discontent has only increased, since I finished the last available volume of the book series, A Dance with Dragons, and the promised sixth volume, The Winds of Winter, still unavailable. Although I didn’t really like the book series, I still fought my way through them, expecting to find some closure for the various plots and subplots. However, nowI am still waiting for the next volume to appear. Though despite his sincere promises, George R.R. Martin has not even finished book six yet. There are recurring updates on his webpage that keep postponing the actual publication of the next instalment. For true fans this must be extremely annoying, but I fear that Martin’s publisher doesn’t enjoy this ongoing delay either. As the next TV series is due out in April this year (and obviously people have been working on the production of the TV series for the better part of last year) the appearance of volume six seems to have become somehow redundant. From my point of view, the delayed publication of the sixth volume in close correlation with the launch of series six of the on-screen adaptation clashes quite negatively. But who will suffer from the obvious disadvantages of this development besides time-pressed fans? I am afraid Martin’s publisher will suffer via a reduced interest in the books and consequently lower sales figures.

I therefore wonder, whether there should be some further restrictions that could help avoiding these sort of developments. Even though I didn’t really enjoy the novels, I would have read them just for the sake of finding out what happens to the various characters. However, with Martin not being able to produce the next volume before the TV launch, I will probably reconsider reading The Winds of Winter, and I am sure I won’t be the only one. But I feel that this is the wrong development. Is it not more beneficial to read a book and engage your mind than just to watch TV? Even though I can recommend both the Harry Potter films as well as the books, I know of some people who just watched the films. When I asked them if they’ve read the books, they only shook their heads. Why read the book if you can watch the film?! I feel that people miss out by only watching the screen adaptations of certain books, for example the Harry Potter series or Eco’s Name of the Rose. Reference George R.R. Martin’s Songs of Fire and Ice this is a very different story.

1)     Why do publishers take on the production and publishing of (unfinished) book series when the rights for screen adaptations are sold initially?

2)     How has the accelerated pace of screen adaptations changed book publishing? What are potential effects of this change?

Some news regarding the (non)publication of volume 6:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/the-winds-of-winter-release-date-2015-george-rr-martin-hints-at-spring-with-a-promise-of-spring-a6713396.html

http://www.inquisitr.com/2533925/winds-of-winter-release-date-george-r-r-martin-drops-hint-that-books-already-in-the-publishing-house/

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[1] In this case it is interesting to take a look at Martin’s excerpt from volume six The Winds of Winter to the TV series. http://www.georgerrmartin.com/excerpt-from-the-winds-of-winter/. The plot-line concerning Sansa/Alayne has become incoherent. 

Spinach, 15th Century Almanacs and Me: The Beauty of the Useless

I have been studying history for many years and often I find myself confronted with a question that every humanities student has been confronted with at least once in their life, in one variation or the other. It is the inevitable - What's it good for? It is a simple enough question to which the either clueless or devious questioner may expect an equally simple answer. Of course, the issue is much more complex than the simplicity of the question may suggest to an unsuspecting interlocutor. Since it touches upon multi-layered and somewhat philosophical justifications of a whole academic field, a layman may be immediately at loss with a reasonable answer that lives up to the actual complexity of the question. The questioner then struggles to come up with something short and concise and usually fails.

That, and, well, maybe the questioners do not know themselves really. Maybe they never really thought about it or they don’t care. Maybe their subject is just something they like, even love and then never thought much about further. Just like some people like spinach and eat it all the time, the question “What's spinach good for?” just never occurs to them, other than that they like it, even though they may well think of some form of "The iron and the calcium are quite healthy!" if someone keeps pestering them.

What is the study of history good for? What is the study of book history good for? What are the practical applications of these fields? What can they teach us? Cicero famously once said, historia magistra vitae est (History is life’ teacher). That certainly makes sense to a history student or enthusiast but your Average Joe might not be satisfied with that explanation when the trigger for the question was the practical use of, say, Organisational structures of mercenary companies in fifteenth century Hesse. Or it may not be immediately clear to Joe (or Jane) why Possibilities of political participation in Greek poleis of the pre-classical period should be relevant for his struggle to find a job or a spouse. And maybe they are not.

So what do these after all not altogether deep considerations have to do with anything? Enter The British Library. It is the largest library in the world with about fourteen million books. One of its highlights is the Digitized Manuscripts section on its homepage and one of the biggest treasure troves for every book enthusiast out there. Among other things it contains large numbers of medieval texts, the most famous probably being the Harley Scripts:

The Harley Science Project, funded by William and Judith Bollinger, makes available images and descriptions of 150 medieval and modern scientific manuscripts from the British Library’s Harley collection. (...) They comprise texts relating to early scientific knowledge, such as astronomy, astrology, the computus, mathematics, physics, botany, medicine and veterinary science.

Wonderful! Every enthusiast thinks, and happily starts clicking his way through all these old manuscripts and illustrations. First of all he will notice that the site and the manuscripts themselves are easy to navigate. There is a search function for those who know what they are looking for, and a highlights section for those who don't. Every document is cataloged with date, title, information about language, a physical description of the text, its ownership and a little bibliography with relevant texts. Most importantly perhaps, as we are about to discover in a moment, is a short summary of the content of most of the pages and illustrations. When an enthusiast starts clicking their way through all these old texts, they will notice that navigation is exceedingly easy and fluid. One can freely zoom in and out of the high-resolution image to assess even the tiniest of little spots and stains and marks time may have left on the page. Information about the content is always readily available; the content can be easily accessed. The enthusiasts’ hearts may thus beat a little faster than it should while one skims through all these old pages and looks at them from all kinds of angles. Alas.

If other enthusiast is anything like me, they may end up rather sooner than later with a hollow feeling where his excitement has been just moments earlier. What's it good for? Or in this specific case: What the hell am I even looking at? Naturally, the content summary will give one some idea at least but that is hardly comparable to being able to read the text yourself. Reading, however, is out of the question for us mere mortals, encountering pages that may look like this: 

Most of us won't be able to decipher the letters, read Medieval Latin or Old English fluently (if at all) or make sense of the images in the scripts. Unless one is a highly specialised expert, there is simply not much one could actually do with these scans other than appreciate them. And appreciating them we do, still. After a moment of being dumbfounded and feeling a sense of loss, like witnessing something really beautiful that we may always be excluded of, we continue clicking. We may not understand fully, but we may get a sense of the sheer weight of the compiled knowledge, of the beauty of the typeset, the brilliancy of the colours, the gravity of the historical document.

So when the British Library just recently announced that they had entered ten of their 15^th century Almanacs on their Digitized Manuscripts site, I rejoiced, even though I knew I would never be able to actually use them for anything, to find any practical application, hell, I wouldn’t even be able to read them. Yet I clicked my way through almost all of them. Had someone found me thus, slowly clicking my way through these scripts while sipping a cup of coffee, turning a page around here, zooming in there, he may have asked What's it good for? Well, frankly, I don't know. I do know that what I look at is somehow important. And that it is also beautiful, even though, for me, it is the beauty of the useless.

What do we accomplish in making these texts available at anyone with an Internet connection when the vast majority cannot access the textual content?

Does the inability of most people to read and understand the content of these texts lessen the importance of a digitized archive?

Does this type of archive make sense for these types of texts? What sort of texts does this sort of archive make sense for, if not 15^th century almanacs and Medieval texts?

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2015/12/all-manacs-on-line.html

What you gonna do with all those books, all those up in your library?

Happy holidays, fellow book studies travellers! We in the BAPS program hope it was magical and awesome (or at least relaxing). This was supposed to be a short post, but book nerds tend to nerd out.

Over Christmas, I had a friend visiting from São Paulo who used to work at a bookshop there. We were talking about this Book Studies class (book nerds of the world, unite!) and she was talking about the different things that went on in this bookstore, the different things people bought, and the ways they bought them.

First, she told me about a specific customer. Every month, the different workers at the bookshop would compile a list of thirty books, using published bestseller lists, the shop’s bestseller list, their own preferences, and word of mouth of various genres, fiction and non-fiction. They would put these books into a box for this customer, who would then buy these thirty books. Every month. Thirty books. Apparently he told my friend that he had a separate apartment for all of these books, he never read them; he only kept them. She figured he couldn’t have read them, unless he was a freakishly fast reader. He never let people borrow them, and apparently didn’t even break the spines. He seemed to be building a person library of un-used, unopened books.

This first story left me with a lot of questions:

Why buy books that you will not or could not read?

What is the point of warehousing books in such a way?

What were they for?

Was he actually building a library of recommendations from this bookshop? Why?

What will happen to these books when he dies? Who will get them? Will anyone?

If you can afford to buy all these books monthly, why not make them available to those who are reading them?

While this story left me plotting a way to learn Portuguese, get to Brazil, and break into this flat, there was another thing she told me about. One of the services this bookshop offered was selling books by the meter. Customers who were decorating their homes or real estate agents who were staging homes would request a certain length of books, sometimes with a specific colour, size, or theme in mind. These books could also be used for TV, film, or commercials. These were all actual text-filled books. They were just decorative, set pieces for someone’s home or potential home.

I wonder if they ever read them, considering they are decoration. Anyone who’s ever been in a house with a lot of decorative pillows knows those are NOT for sleeping on. When the house is finally sold, does the buyer get the books? Do they just move on to new homes?

I looked into this ‘books by the meter’ (or foot, for our friends still using imperial units). Some are a rental service; some specialise in rare and old-looking books (basically the ones that would fill Dumbledore’s office). But on my googling adventure, I found this line from an Australian company that offers this service:

“Our selections will please the eye and lend an intellectual, cultured air to any space they occupy. Books represent accumulated knowledge. Books more than furnish a room, they positively bring it to life.”

Now I’m left with more questions. While I can understand why books can be symbols used this way, what does it say when this symbol is emptied out of meaning and replaced with just the form (simulation much)? Why do we place such a heavy emphasis on the ownership of books to prove a rich intellectual legitimacy? Why is this ownership sufficient? If a book is never to be read, can we properly call it a BOOK or is there something that it loses when it will never encounter a reader? I’m not referring only to the text, but interplay between text and book. Is there a point when book-formed objects stop being what we understand as a BOOK because this function is taken away?  Or is decoration part of the function of books?