Recently I read this post by Mark O’Connell and it got me thinking. Yes, that is dangerous.
I was going to post the following as a comment on Mr. O’Connell’s original post, and decided against it. If anyone’s blog is going to be opened up to a spam storm, it may as well be mine.
The advent of photography led to the lament that painting would be unnecessary. That isn’t the way the story unfolded. Photography freed up painters from having to be tied to a purely visual reality. Photography’s existence doesn’t prevent painters from creating hard-edged realism, but the ability to photograph a subject alleviates the pressure to do so. The artist’s freedom to infuse what is seen with what is felt opens the medium to the possibility of deeper and more complex expressions.
When I met my husband in 2004, I knew we were kindred spirits when I discovered that each of us owns the same 1957 edition of Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. Without books and CDs littering our homes, how do we recognize each other as potential friends or lovers? Should we compare Amazon Wish Lists?
We have a library in our home and we continue to add to the shelves and stacks on a regular basis. I also have several ways to read e publications at my disposal. I doubt I will ever stop wanting to own my wonderful collection of vintage knitting books or that my husband will ever part with his astronomy reference books. It would also be impossible for me to quantify the amount of entertaining discussion spurred by the discovery of my parents’ marginalia in a decrepit volume. Besides the stories they hold, the books themselves are a part of our personal history. Much of the experience of encountering these works is the aesthetic pleasure of perusing them. At the same time, I love being able to finish an embarrassingly sappy novel and, despite the four feet of snow outside, slip right into the next volume without risking life and limb.
I think of books the way I think of food. There is food that is mere sustenance. There is food that is high art. And there are a lot of meals that fall somewhere in between the two. I am hopeful that the ability of everyone to publish an ebook, will liberate gifted writers, publishers, and book designers to focus their talents on evolving the art form of printed books. For the time being, my rule of thumb is that any book I would be unlikely to reread or lend, I will buy either used or as an e publication.
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