The currency of our realm

Books — they're the currency of our realm, and if I didn't buy them and take them out of the library by the dozens, week after week, there might actually be some room in my office. And yet I have always found most Princeton undergraduates to be strangely uninterested in books. Sure, they read them, once in a while, but they seem unable to distinguish a Princeton University Press product from a Yale one at 10 yards, don't know what a serif is and can't spell "frontispiece." They also believe that something printed in 1865 or 1945 is "really old" (I wish I had a florin for every student who has said like words to me in breathless astonishment while holding some frankly unremarkable volume from Firestone's stacks as though it were a Hittite tablet), thereby showing that they know nothing about our collection of incunabula (a word they do not know) and unintentionally making a mockery of the history of the book, a subject that some of their professors practice with particular distinction.

It doesn't help that Princeton has never had world-class bookstores; it doesn't help that members of the library staff are given the infantilizing task of handing out small squeezable brains at the start of each academic year; and it doesn't help that most students arrive wild and wired for wikipedia. If you are still with me and have not thrown away your paper in disgust or moved on to one of the "paid advertisements" in the online edition, then please join the Friends of the Library (there's also a student branch) and allow me to suggest how you might spend a pleasurable hour or two in the company of the printed word.

Bookstores: Micawber Books, here since 1981, will be gone in a month. There is still time for you to graze in the increasingly rare field of an independent seller, to pick up something unexpected (a recent foray yielded Julian Spalding's "Poetic Museum," which objects to the mindless interactive displays found in ever more museum collections) and — since prices have been slashed in sad anticipation of the end — to save money over soulless (if conveniently clickable) amazon.com. Also, don't you want to say goodbye to Bobbie Fishman or whoever your own favorite recommender of books at Micawber may be?

Libraries: The way to learn how to use a library is, in fact, to use it. And the way to enjoy it, and to learn about books, is to explore. There are wonderful corners in Firestone and the other campus libraries, and I find it depressing that there are probably only a small handful of students who know what both "(Dixon)" and "(DPA)" mean and have had the experience of browsing and getting lost in each. Do yourself a favor and let your fingers do the walking, in a familiar area or a new one. Don't be timid: think how delicious it is to discover serendipitously on C-Floor Neil Begg's "Intervening Years: A New Zealand Account of the Period between the 1910 Visit of Halley's Comet and its Reappearance in 1986" right next to a German book on medicine in Samoa!

Online resources: Princeton announced earlier this month that one million of our books will be made available to Google and digitized. Not surprisingly, I am suspicious of such efforts and will let Nicholson Baker do the talking, whose "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper" is a characteristic tour-de-force. I could go on for pages about the problems with scanned documents and mention here only that scanning gets maybe 98 percent of "normal" characters right, a figure that should make any serious scholar shudder; furthermore, no one with a historical perspective could possibly be sanguine about the longterm prospects of digitized information, however high the quality is perceived to be at the time of transfer. But since the "partnership" with Google is evidently going to happen, which books should we hand over? Clearly the most obscure ones, the ones most likely to go unnoticed now that they are no longer in the accessible stacks. (Keep in mind that when Firestone opened in 1948, it was the largest open-stack library in the world. No longer, it seems — and the more the building is thought of as a lounge rather than a repository of knowledge, the worse off Princeton's teaching and scholarship will be.) John Logan, Literature Bibliographer and campus treasure, has made the excellent suggestion that we let Google begin with the books in ReCAP and the Annexes: Sir Cyril Norwood's pamphlet "The Poetry of the Bible" (found in American libraries, according to WorldCat, only at Princeton and four seminaries), for example, and Fanny Elizabeth Sidebottom's "Across the Years" (only at Chapel Hill, Davis and Princeton), of which we happen to possess the copy the poet gave to her son ("Tom. / From his mother — / Fanny Elizabeth Sidebottom. / January 14th / 1911"), a copy in which Tom himself neatly noted in pencil that he had visited Tangier in May 1897.

But enough — I'm curling back up with Sidebottom. Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics, Senior Fellow of Forbes College and the John Witherspoon Bicentennial Preceptor. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.