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The World of Books Has Changed, Part 1

how the modern-day book scene is more like Homer's

The World of Books Has Changed, Part 1

My eleven-year old self assumed as a matter of course that by the time I was a "grown-up" I'd have published several books.  In dark times, I've summoned up her spirit to belabor me because that's not the case.  Would she have been content with the mere handful of poems, essays, book reviews, one or two academic articles, and hundreds of blog posts published?

I appeal to her mercy: things are different now. She'd never heard of the Internet--makes me sound like a dinosaur, and I'm only in my thirties! Even aside from the book-like nature of a good blog, the world of books has changed.

(Turns out there's way more to say about how books have changed than will fit in a single post.)

Books as cultural memory:
Before there were books, when oral tradition and the ability to improvise around a stock of formulaic expressions formed the Homeric poems, despite the absence of physical books, permanence in the memory was expected. Referring to herself and Paris, Helen says to Hector, "because of the trouble we caused, Zeus established  a grim fate for us, that we should become subject of song for those to come even in future times." (Iliad book 6.356-8, my translation).

A few hundred years later, the historian Thucydides wrote his book in the tragic hope that it would short-circuit the human-created tragedies produced by history's tendency to repeat itself. In the introduction, he says of his work "it is set down as a possession in perpetuity rather than a set piece to be listened to in the moment." (Thucydides 1.22.4, my translation).

A book as possession, implying value and materiality, was one thing in the days when everything was copied by hand, crammed onto precious, scarce paper made out of goatskin or pressed reeds, when books were typically read aloud, slowly, puzzling out the meaning unaided by word division or much punctuation, and when few could read. But two thousand years later, when the printing press and deforestation efforts had made books far more available (albeit still in a context of mass illiteracy), Shakespeare says something quite similar. To the dedicatee of Sonnet 18, he says,

"But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
nor lose possession of the fair thou ow'st,
nor shall Death brag thou wandrest in his shade
when in eternal lines to time thou growest.
So long as men shall live or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

He makes a similar claim for the immortality of his song to what the Iliad has Helen say as much as two thousand years earlier!

I think eleven-year-old Ela had in mind producing an everlasting object that people would enjoy and admire. But, back to that process vs. product idea, she had no detailed idea of what the book-writing and publishing process would involve. And by the time she woke up and realized that it wasn't going to just happen by itself, the world of books had transformed.

Instead of an object on a shelf, a book can just as easily be a set of code realized on a screen. Or a set of data to be printed on demand in a bookstore. And, although books are certainly still used as stable objects of record and as solid productions, books themselves are more and more becoming embodiments of process. You can go back in and rewrite the book multiple times as the same publication, just as I can come back and change this blog post. With the benefit of timestamping and caching, one can even access multiple versions of the book-process, like video recordings of an adult as a child (none exist of me, btw), or time-lapse photography of a growing plant. 

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, though. In English, "The more the change, the more it's the same thing." The Homeric poems, which scholars for centuries considered to be the first "b ooks," turn out to be works predicated on a subtle blend of memory, strict metrical structure, a backbone of stock expressions and stories, and improvisation.

They are still some of the most beautiful literature I've ever encountered. And until they started to be written down, they were a process! No two renditions were quite the same; indeed, there were even competitions, which presupposes difference. Plus, it's not quite timestamping, but if you look at the language used in the poems, forms of words belonging to different periods of Greek coexist in there, allowing us to see how different parts of the poems belonged to different periods.

So, the Homeric rhapsode (the technical term for the poet; rhapsode means "stitcher of verses") was somewhat akin to the modern-day computer, in terms of the manifestation of a "book." Or vice versa. If the modern-day book is more like Homer, all Luddites should rejoice, and all early adopters should embrace their inner radical.

About the Author

Ela Harrison

Ela is a wordsmith and herb lover who has lived in many places and currently resides in Tucson, AZ.

Comments (5)

  • Stacy

    Stacy

    11 December 2014 at 16:11 | #

    I just got rid of about 60 books off my shelves this week, realizing that they are so much chatter, mental clutter. Yes, the meaning of books has changed: their ubiquity has depressed their value.

    reply

    • Ela

      Ela

      12 December 2014 at 12:26 | #

      Stacy, so good to read you here! I hope you kept some of your books--I always admired the great collection and selection on your shelves. Phil says books are expensive wallpaper. I was so annoyed by that at first, but I guess there is some truth to it.

      reply

  • Lucy

    Lucy

    14 December 2014 at 12:34 | #

    Hi Ela, its interesting what you said about how they were trying to make things permanent when they wrote books. I remember when I was a kid in school they basically taught us that if it was in a book it can be true or valid and if it was on the internet it may or may not be true cause any joe blow can write something on the internet. (I think that was the rational?) So they forced us to site 10 books for every one internet reference. Maybe that idea of books=truth is still floating around, but then what is an e-book? Half truth? :-) The thing you said about books being products or wallpaper was funny too. I recently tried to convert all my reading to kindle. But there was some books I could just not get let go of. They tended to be spiritual, meditation type books that I saw as having true, permanent wisdom. But also maybe I just liked having them on my shelf as some sort of fashion accessory to my room, Product!, because admittingly I don't read them very often. When you look at my kindle library its got cheezy stuff like "how to not pay taxes" or "how to be a vixen in bed" Just kidding BTW. But stuff that I wouldn't proudly display on my shelves. I was purely paying for the info for one reason or another. If it means anything to you Ela, if this blog were a book, I would proudly display it on my shelf!

    reply

    • Ela

      Ela

      20 December 2014 at 19:50 | #

      Hey Lucy!
      That is so interesting, the wallpaper aspect of whether you'd want other people to see you had the book or not. Like when the made "adult" covers of the Harry Potter books to make them look more serious for grown ups. So silly! But the landscape of the book world has definitely changed since we went to school. And even Wikipedia is becoming legit!
      Thank you for your kind words.
      love
      Ela

      reply

    • Ela

      Ela

      20 December 2014 at 19:50 | #

      Hey Lucy!
      That is so interesting, the wallpaper aspect of whether you'd want other people to see you had the book or not. Like when the made "adult" covers of the Harry Potter books to make them look more serious for grown ups. So silly! But the landscape of the book world has definitely changed since we went to school. And even Wikipedia is becoming legit!
      Thank you for your kind words.
      love
      Ela

      reply

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