30 Times Higher Education8 February 2018
OPINION
Prints charming
Books offer an experience, evidence trail and egalitarianism that
could never be digitised, say Al Martinich and Tom Palaima
A
cademics in the liberal arts face many
personal and professional anxieties, but
there is one deep concern that underlies
them all: the demise of the book.
Opening the pages of a library book was
for centuries a source of unalloyed intellectual,
spiritual and social pleasure for all academics.
That experience was a treasure we shared with
our students, colleagues, friends and families,
creating indelible memories and transforming
lives. But it is an experience that has increas-
ingly been marginalised and even dismissed.
When we were growing up, we viewed
books as our friends and as symbols and
instruments of the promises and possibilities
of our democracy. Coming from ethnic
working-class areas of the industrial city
of Cleveland, we lugged volumes back and
forth to the Roman Catholic high schools
we attended. We read them in study halls,
on buses, in our bedrooms and basements,
in local public libraries and moving libraries
called bookmobiles. The more than 2,500
Carnegie Foundation libraries built in towns
and cities across the US between 1883 and
1929 gave people like us access to books that
we could not afford to buy, while the mass
production of cheap paperbacks allowed us
to build our own personal libraries. All this
provided a level playing field that even the
cheapest laptops, mobile devices and internet
services cannot duplicate.
But it is not nostalgia that makes us
uneasy. Books are endangered. They are being
disappeared and destroyed at educational
institutions of all levels, but arguably most
barbarously at large state universities, where
capacious libraries were once designed to
serve students and all citizens of their states.
At the University of Texas at Austin, the
undergraduate library was built in 1963 for
$38 million in 2018 dollars (£27 million).
Within 20 years it housed 157,000 books,
and its holdings kept on growing until 2005,
when the library was cleared and rebranded
as an “academic centre”, complete with 250
computers and a café. About 90,000 books
were transferred elsewhere; the fate of the rest
can only be imagined.
Books are arguably the crucial factor in
the achievements of Western and eventually
world civilisation over the past 600 years.
They have survived being banned and burned
by oppressive regimes. Shrewd plantation
owners forbade young black slaves from
teaching themselves to read, but slaves like
Frederick Douglass read books secretly in
“largely surreptitious self-education”. Yet
now books are disappeared at universities
of all places by upper administrative fiat.
Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable
type in 1439 made the production of books
faster and cheaper, enabling more people to
buy and read them. Increasing literacy created
more readers and authors – and more books.
Once chained in monasteries, books were
now liberated. Great universities and cities
produced great lending libraries. Canadian
philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s metaphor
of the “Gutenberg galaxy”, coined in 1962,
is dazzlingly appropriate.
However, the Gutenberg galaxy is now
rapidly contracting. Managers of university
and public libraries have been busyDAVID HUMPHRIES“deaccessioning” scholarly books, periodicals,
journals and monographs. In the past two
years, UT Austin’s senior administrators –
almost all non-humanists – have unilaterally
moved far along in “remote-storing” and
“deduplicating” the historically and education-
ally priceless holdings of our Fine Arts Library,
which was previously a jewel in our institu-
tion’s crown of humanistic research resources.
In phase one of the project, 55,000 books and
20,000 journals were removed; 85,000 more
are targeted.
Unless the university authorities bow to
faculty, public and alumni protests and
suddenly reverse course, they will eradicate
what the Fine Arts graduate faculty calls
“the equivalent of an up-to-date laboratory
in the sciences”. The newspeak provisions of
the “Joint Library Facility” recently created
for the two major public university systems
in Texas make clear that, in at least some
cases, “deaccessioning” and “deduplicating”
holdings are indeed euphemisms not only for
removing books from accessible collections
but for destroying them. At Texas A&M, for
cost reasons, “disposal (shredding and recy-
cling) by an outside vendor is preferred”.
Worse still, because state universities are
now run on the corporate model, senior
administrators do not consult the faculties of
the colleges affected before dismantling special-
ist libraries. For purposes of space allocation,
libraries are lumped together with scientific
laboratories and administrative offices and
deemed outside the purview of faculty. Admin-
istrators favour “reimagining” existing spaces
and library directors want to be part of the
historic shift to digitised information; our
college of library science has rebranded itself
the School of Information.
Yet even if the production of hard copy
books goes the way of vinyl recordings,
extant library books retain inestimable value.
They are historical artefacts. Consecutive
editions over time speak to the evolution of
ideas. Much-used library copies make us
aware that books are part of our long-shared
cultural experience. For scholars of the early
modern period, watermarks on pages yield
important information about publication;
who knows what physical properties future
scholars will want to study? They won’t be
able to study books that no longer exist.
Individual physical volumes invite us to
spend time alone with them, off-line, without
distracting pop-ups and sidebars, and without
the shadow of Big Brother: with just their
contents and our own thoughts. Those who
are responsible for the impending implosion
of the Gutenberg galaxy have not reflected
on the black hole it will create. The galaxy
of books should not die with a whimper, nor
with a bang. It should not die at all.
It would be great to have the legendary
ancient library of Alexandria digitised, but
even better would be to retrieve its books
from the flames.Al Martinich and Tom Palaima are professors
of philosophy and Classics respectively at the
University of Texas at Austin.