Emory University<\/em> in Atlanta, it took volunteers over a year just to unbox all the volumes.\u00a0 The university is now the major center for researching 20th Century English poetry books.<\/p>\nI’d like to see that collection.\u00a0 It must be fascinating.\u00a0 And anything is worth touching that Walt Whitman touched.\u00a0 Seeing books is the thing.\u00a0 They have a presence in a room, lining its walls and giving it enormous depth.\u00a0 But we are engaged in a process of making our books invisible.\u00a0 What will we put in their place?\u00a0 I’m not really too worried about that because when you turn all those words into digital form you present yourself with infinite possibility.\u00a0 When words float around in the air you are in the realm of magic beyond anything any book could have ever accomplished.\u00a0 Then again, sometimes just touching a book is enough to send your mind wandering down an unexpected path.\u00a0 Can touching a virtual keyboard have the same effect?\u00a0 Does it have to have the same effect?\u00a0 Maybe not.\u00a0 I’m sure banging a chisel into a clay tablet did things to a mind that ancient peoples were loath to part with.<\/p>\n
Does the emergence of a world without books frighten or worry you?\u00a0 Do you see something wrong with a world in which literature is simply information that travels wirelessly?\u00a0 Do you think that ink is inherently superior to bits?<\/p>\n
Eventually, we will read War and Peace<\/em> by passing someone on the street and glancing into their eyes for a brief moment.\u00a0 That person will give us the book as nothing more than a polite ‘How do you do?’\u00a0 At that point, we will remember books the way we remember the clay tablet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Remember the book?\u00a0 Of course you do, because you have plenty of them in shelves, half-read, dusty, bent, torn, coffee-stained, wine-colored, smudged, smelly, misprinted, broken and cherished. They catch your glance as you walk from one room to another, reminding you of a year or a moment when you were doing something else but had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[137,148,319],"tags":[2500,243,2501],"class_list":["post-2836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-poetry","category-technology","tag-books","tag-ebooks","tag-poetry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2836"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2840,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2836\/revisions\/2840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"LeavesOfGrassBook\"](\"\/\/www.candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/LeavesOfGrassBook.jpg\" "\\"LeavesOfGrassBook\\"")
Remember the book?\u00a0 Of course you do, because you have plenty of them in shelves, half-read, dusty, bent, torn, coffee-stained, wine-colored, smudged, smelly, misprinted, broken and cherished. They catch your glance as you walk from one room to another, reminding you of a year or a moment when you were doing something else but had that book in your bag or backseat and meant to finish it or did in fact, and put it away and moved it several times in a box, cursing its weight and trying not to bend it.\u00a0 So there it sits now, quite possibly closed until the day you die.\u00a0 But you know it’s there and it’s a marker in your life.\u00a0 Remember this thing with books?<\/p>\n