`The Scent of the Past'

Eric Ormsby is a poet, critic, translator, scholar of Islamic intellectual history, and now professor and chief librarian at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. One might say he is an amateur and professional lover of books who understands their critical importance to cultural well-being. In 2001, he contributed “The Battle of the Book” to a New Criterion series on “The Survival of Culture.” Ormsby’s and nine other essays were published in 2002 as a book of the same title. Part of me thinks it peculiar, even perverse, that a writer should feel compelled to defend the centrality of books and learning to civilization, but as Ormsby writes:

“…for the survival of culture, we need all the help we can get, whether in words baked on ancient tablets, set in cold type, or amid the pixels of the scanner and the computer screen.”

The barbarians breeched the gates long ago and many were born within the walls. Ormsby draws up a scorecard in the war between defenders of the book and partisans of digitalized information. His own reasonable position is that books and computers are both essential, though clearly his sympathies lie with the printed page – literally:

“A book is intensely physical, even sensuous. Reading is not a disincarnate, cerebral activity but a solidly physical process in which we deploy almost all our senses, and no doubt a Freudian pleasure-principle is at work while we read. After all, we are at least subliminally conscious of the weight of the book in our hands, the design and layout of the pages engage our eye, the typeface is pleasing or annoying or diverting, marginalia or underscorings may arrest our attention, we can smell the ink at times, and graze the texture of the pages, the binding, the dust jacket with our fingertips.”

Ormsby’s words returned to me as I was looking for a passage in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. I own four copies, printed in three centuries. The one I use most often is the recent Everyman’s edition. I like its pleasingly zaftig, hand-filling squatness, its brick-like heft and its index. But the one I most enjoy using is the oldest, edited by the Right Honourable John Wilson Croker and published by John Murray of Albemarle Street, London, in 1847 – 56 years after its first publication, 63 years after its subject’s death. My brother gave it to me several years ago. The leather binding is scuffed and worn but solidly intact. The end papers are marbled. A typed, homemade bookplate, about the size of a magazine label, is glued to the inside cover: “H.E. Handerson, 784 Lexington Ave., New York City.” The typing is flawless and the three, double-spaced lines are indented four spaces in from the preceding line. Its 874 pages are printed in two columns and remain glossy and only sparingly foxed, though after 161 years they’ve turned the color of weak tea. There are no markings in the book, which smells pleasantly of leather and must, with a chemical hint of ink if you place your nose in the valley where the pages meet. This sensory bundle suggests Johnson, lexicographer and son of a book seller, and some Platonic essence of bookness as no paperback ever could. Its age – its first reader could have walked the London streets with Boswell and Johnson – and antiquated appearance, coupled with its sturdiness, nicely reflect the uncertain future of all books. Ormsby continues:

“No doubt I am biased, but it strikes me that a covert complicity exists between book and reader that does not obtain between computer and user. Reading a book becomes an experience in one’s life in a way that consulting a computer cannot be (or, at least, cannot be yet). The computer is unsurpassable for the transmission of facts, of raw information, as well as for its miraculous indexing properties, but it does not – again, perhaps, does not yet – engage our imaginations and intellects in quite the same way a book does.”

To demonstrate the true worth of digital technology, I Googled the name of the former owner of the Life of Johnson open on my desk – H.E. Handerson. Among other things I learned he was the author of at least one book, Gilbertus Anglicus: Medicine of the Thirteenth Century, published posthumously, in 1918, by the Cleveland Medical Library Association. Handerson was a doctor and Civil War veteran and prisoner of war, and if you go here you can read his book and more about him, and see his picture. He was born in 1837and died on Shakespeare’s birthday in 1918. So, now I feel a connection, no matter how tenuous, with Johnson and a doctor from my home town, Cleveland. Ormsby writes:

“When we open an old book, or one we read in childhood, the scent of the past that rises up can bring back whole Proustian realms in its gust.”