The Gutenberg Elegies
The Gutenberg Elegies
The Gutenberg Elegies is a book of literate, insightful essays for booklovers to give thanks to, for Sven Birkerts writes as one of us, "the dreamy fellow with an open book in his lap . . . an unregenerate reader."
Inspired by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Birkerts invokes her as "the instigating presence for an inquiry into the place of reading and sensibility in what is becoming an electronic culture." He is worried, "startled by how little we are debating the deeper philosophical ramifications regarding the wiring of the world, the loss of life of the solitary self, the expanding electronic web bridging the individual solitude." He asks, "Why hasn't someone stepped forward to explain what is going on?" So he does just that.
Birkerts sees a society moving away from books for enlightenment. Though we are now buying books in the billions each year, the expansion in sales is coming primarily from the over-30 population; those under that mark are buying and/or reading far fewer books than their parents and grandparents did at that age. "The child lives in an entertainment environment as never before."
He believes we need to calculate value on the basis of something other than the numerical availability of books. While the book is not being eliminated, its role in the cultural marketplace is becoming minor, except as it fits into the TV talk show hype. Birkerts wonders, "Does it matter to be smart or cultivated, or to think about things subtly and at depth? . . . We have entered the world of Disney, and I am seized by the fear that there might be no way out."
An especially enjoyable essay is "The Paper Chase: An Autobiographical Fragment," as he details his life in books‹as student, reader, poet, bookseller, novelist, antiquarian bookseller, essayist. He writes of the complex nature of reading while growing up, how because of family dynamics, his reading pattern had to be private, if not secret. "As a boy I stood in the local bookshop and tried to read my way through the Hardy Boys books I didn't own."
We all can relate to his stories of reading into the night, of walking around school anxious to return to the paperback in his pocket, seeing the rest of the external world as an impediment to his real education.
There are wonderful descriptions of reading, capturing that essential isolation from the world that causes us "to blink with the shock of looking up from the vortex of the page to face the strangely immobile world around us, the shadow life after the page is read, the book is closed."
Birkerts urges us to read books that give us context, and his own book is one of those to give verticality to our reading and our thinking. This is not an easy book, but it's worthwhile, and it will not appear in any hypertext file!
George Cowmeadow Bauman is a career bibliopole and a lifetime bibliophile, if not an outright bibliomaniac.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.