"I went looking for a book"

 

Yesterday, I went looking for a copy of Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson's edition of the poems of Emily Dickinson.  It was cold out, as all Michigan dead-of-winters happen to be, and, after finding the catalog entry I was looking for (or rather a close enough approximation thereof), I was loath to brave the wind and the salt-encrusted pavement just to check a reference in a book I would likely not end up using anyway.  But what luck!  The ongoing efforts of the Hathi Trust and Google Books (in alliance with various university libraries, namely yours truly, the University of Michigan) foresaw my laziness and the intellectual inertia it would inspire, so they went ahead and digitized the 1901 edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson (second series) so that I could satisfy my momentary whim from the relative discomfort of my home desktop.  I thus confirmed my suspicion about the marked absence of a particular hyphen (haha!) and, now with plenty of free time on my hands, began wandering through the digital document that had saved me from the compulsions of my own sloth.  This is when I noticed something peculiar.

If you, dear reader, would like to follow along with story time, the link immediately above will bring you to where we will begin.

According to the Hathi Trust's FAQ, a "missing page" designation can mean any of three things.  1) "Pages were missing from the library's print copy of the book;" this is doubtful given the "page" in question is the cover.  2) "One or more pages were not scanned;" well, duh, but that doesn't give any indication as to why.  3) "In some cases, Google will misidentify a page, leading them to believe that a page is missing when it is not;" again, this is highly unlikely here given the "misidentified page" would be the cover.  I make no claims about the intellectual acumen of the fine employees at Google, but I'd like to believe they wouldn't misidentify the cover.  Of the three options, I obviously favor "was not scanned," but this statement amounts to a completely unexplanatory *shrug*.  Irritated with a wholly unnecessary stimulation of my pendantic curiosities, I got up from my desk, took a shower, got dressed, and left to trample the mile or so of salt-rimed pavement between my apartment and the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library where the "library's print copy" (why not just say "original" - another curiosity...) is housed.

You won't find 828 D553 Ser. 2 1901 on the shelves of the third floor of the south stacks, and not because it went mysteriously missing.  Leveraging one of the few privileges I still retain as adjunct faculty of our fine university, I took 828 D553 Ser. 2 1901 down to the circulation desk and checked it out.  It's a peculiar object, 828 D553 Ser. 2 1901--you may wonder why I don't simply refer to our poor little book as the 1901 edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson, as I do above.  The simplest and most honest answer is that it is not 1901 edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson but a facsimile produced the book preservation and conservation unit of the university library.  How do I know this?  I should begin by pointing out that to hold the book and see it, this fact is obvious.  It is significantly larger than every other edition on the shelves, its cover is much newer, the paper is much newer, and it bears a bibliographic code on page 3 that makes clear this is a facsimile:

grad
31063846

repla
6/17/98
repl

"grad" for graduate library; "31063846" for... honestly, I don't know (perhaps a work order #?); "repla" for replacement; "6/17/98" for June 17, 1998, when, one supposes, the work was completed; and "repl" again for replacement.  One does wonder why this needed to be said twice.  If you've been following along, dear reader, you may have noticed that in the Hathi Trust digital document, this bibliographic code on page three is nearly illegible.  In point of fact, nearly all of the non-"textual" codes that point to the "original" of the digital document being itself a facsimile have been eviscerated.  If it weren't for my own pedantry and for my deep love of old-fashioned print texts, it would have been quite difficult to uncover in the digital document those clues that point to what with the physical book is patently obvious.  You would have to be an inordinately thick moron not to see that the very book I held in my hands (and on that, o dear reader, you will have to take my word!) was not published in 1901 and could not be the historical document all the digital bibliographic codes (including the library's own catalog entry) claim it to be.

Of course, I'm being quite melodramatic; the Google version of the very same digital document (which, oddly, should be the same digital document) retains the bibligraphic code in a completely legible form on its own page 3.  But what this whole experience is meant to unconceal, as Heidegger would say, are all those aspects and conditions of texts we ignore.  As Jerome McGann says in The Scholar's Art (p. 136), "The physical object… is coded and scored with human activity.  An awareness of this is the premise for interpreting material culture, and the awareness is particularly imperative for literary interpretation, where the linguistic 'message' regularly invisibilizes the codependent and equally meaningful 'medium' that codes all messages."

What exactly is a text? What are texts becoming in an age where digital reproduction not only promises to provide access to and new tools for understanding documents from around the world but also threatens to use digital reproductions as an excuse to disregard the materials that heretofore serve as our connection to the textual past? We here at Libral Thinking wish to explore the ramifications of this future in digital media both for the materials to be digitzed and for the digital texts themselves, to emphasize the continuity between physical and digital texts rather than the facile contiguity of the "print is dead" crowd.  Colleen and I (Nicholas) will be bringing you at-least-weekly articles on the future of the book in digital environments with a particularly philosophical and theoretical bent but always with an eye to the practical ramifications of the theoretical. Welcome!

Should you, o dear reader, have any suggestions for topics or particular objects to examine, feel free to email us at libralthinking@gmail.com.