submitted by Tita Taule Mina
 How
far would you go for your literary passion? |
How far would you go for your passion? Given that at home you've only limited shelf space to enshrine your prized volumes, or that the only booksellers around wouldn't, by any stretch of their imagination, make room for pre-20th century literature with no tie-ins with Paramount Pictures, would you boldly go where no variorum edition has gone before? Or to put the proposition another way: Can an inveterate bibliophile whose idea of Viagra is the smell of vellum binding and hot-off-the-press book paper find love on the Internet?
With complete texts of literary classics downloadable from the World Wide Web,
love is just one hyperlink away. For the incurably book-smitten, there's a long
avenue of virtual cafes where you can dawdle, over frothy cappuccino and volumes
of forgotten lore. Thanks to the patient work of encoders, many more of your
favorite classics, if they’re in the public domain, are ending up on the Web
as free-access documents. Called e-texts (or electronic texts) these
online reads make the recondite pleasure of reading a reality for the masses,
not to mention saves a lot of trees. The growing number of electronic reading
sites, which go by such evocative names as Gutenberg and Bartleby, offer feast
upon feast for the book lover without, of course, the smell of hide and the
supple retort of paper
In 1971, when computers consisted of clunky oversized machines called mainframes, an IBM programmer named Michael Hart found himself with more computing time than he knew what to do with. Uneasy about what many others would unequivocally hoard, Hart decided to convert the surplus work hours into a mission, chasing down the Declaration of Independence into binary code or getting Dickens to the general public faster via the plain-text format. Already Project Gutenberg’s shadow towers high across the booming virtual estate of e-text ventures, begging footnotes to what the great Johann had achieved in his time. Will Hart get his just desserts in the book-purveyor’s heaven? You bet.
In the past, every household boasted the sine qua non of Shakespeare and The Bible . . . In the post Gutenberg era, homes will roll out welcome for two types of honored guests: works shot through with individual genius and works with little more to show than as links in the great chain of literary tradition. T. S. Eliot, the man who devised that classification, ostensibly knew how to please the “publish or perish” community.
Over at Bartleby (now Bartleby.com), Columbia University maintains a mix of reads that covers the highs and lows of literary eyebrows in English. From George Chapman's revered translation of Homer to that most venerable of Agatha Christie whodunits, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the Project is the electronic version of a gentleman or gentle lady’s library.
At the moment I'm engrossed in John Buchan's The 39 Steps. I've downloaded alI ten chapters, with the intention of bouncing them off to a precocious nephew who's at the right age for English adventure stories. It's really little more than a thesis on serendipity, but how felicitous the writing, and how interesting that the author was a spy himself, and that for my bookseller's benefit, the book did make that leap from page to screen sometime in the late 70s.
Of course, Columbia U's undertaking takes its name from that quirky character in Herman Melville's novella Bartleby the Scrivener. As a scrivener (copyist) for a law firm on Wall Street at the turn of the century, Bartleby plies his trade in what turn out to be a heroic virtue: the faultless transcription of documents. Sometimes in Melville's fiction, his employer discovers that Bartleby has taken his job overmuch to heart, camping out at the office and refusing all entreaties that he take up lodgings elsewhere. Unwilling to budge, unable to do anything else, least of all make the transition to a more marketable career and to the assembly-line ethic of a new age, Bartleby dies for his dogged way of being: "I would prefer not to."
How ironic that a century after the story's time setting, the need is unimaginable in urgency for thousands of Bartlebys, efficient and ego-less, to faithfully encode the millions and millions of books housed in traditional libraries around the world. (Even Buddhist monks are in short supply of people to encode the Dhammapada.)
What a time this could have been for Bartleby; he could have been rich. But then, what a time this is too, for impoverished scholars and unconscionable book rats: to have brains and not much else. To electronic libraries and their faithful keepers and patrons, from your kind, we desire increase.
