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Re: New Yorker



As an archivist who has recently become very involved in rare book
studies, I have become very sensitive to the physical aspects of
documents.  There has been a bias toward intellectual history in this
discussion in the sense that content matters much more than the physical
properties of the document.  But the physical properties of a book or a
newspaper, particularly one produced before approximately 1800, provide
substantial information concerning labor history (printing shop practice),
business history (how the printing trade in general operated), etc.
For instance, a single book printed in Germany might contain paper made in
Switzerland, Italy, and France (identifiable by watermarks). This tells
the book historian information about the economic organization of the
paper and book industries, as well as information about how a printing
shop used its materials. Not all of this information can be reproduced by
microfilm or digitization.  If the artifact is discarded this information
is lost.

Content is completely irrelevant to these lines of inquiry. To paraphrase
one historian of printing, the only thing we do not do with a book is read
it.

I will, of course, state the obvious and say that we cannot save
everything.  But representative examples of everything should be saved or
else where we are choosing to only save intellectual history and throw
away material history.

Michael Knies
Special Collections Librarian
University of Scranton

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