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Re: New Yorker



This has been an interesting thread.  I agree with Michael that there is a
lot to be excited about in handling a book from the 17th century.  While
there exists a major work on the author I was studying, I was able to find
two watermarks that were not in that scholarly work.  It was one of those
"Eureka!" occasions.  The object of my study of the 13 rare books was to
establish the rarity of each edition.  The curator was then to make a
decision on which to retain and which to sell in order to buy other rare
books for the collection.

Microfilm does not enable one to handle the paper and the vellum, and one
I'd not expect it to but, when working in a preservation microfiling
program, professors would bemoan the loss of books from the shelf.  These
same books were so brittle that they would not exist to be used at all had
they not have been microfilmed.  Those very professors would probably have
been upset to no longer have access to the information that the
preservation microfilming program had saved for their use and for that of
others to come come after them.

For late 19th century and 20th century books that are falling apart even as
we use them, microfilming and/or scanning is the appropriate response to
preserve the information.  Few, if any, organizations have the funding to
give every volume full conservation treatment.  Few, if any, libraries have
the space to keep every volume in their collections.  Public libraries
regularly shelf-read to weed out books that have not circulated beyond the
initial interest.

Microfilming is not ideal but it is probably the best method for
preservation of information for many years to come.  No "eureka's" there.

ronnie c.

Ronnie C.
-----Original Message-----
From:   Michael Knies [SMTP:kniesm2@UOFS.EDU]
Sent:   Thursday, July 20, 2000 3:18 PM
To:     ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
Subject:        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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