Grafton Praises Old Libraries as Well as New Technology

Ellen Gilbert

For young Alfred Kazin, the New York Public Library was a “blessed place,” where he prepared to write his first book, On Native Grounds, by reading his way through American literature without ever leaving Manhattan.

Reading from and discussing his new book, Codex in Crisis, at Labyrinth Books on Monday, Princeton Professor Anthony Grafton described Kazin’s experience and evoked the glories — the quietude, the comprehensive collections, the chance to “dive deep” — provided by great, old libraries, while acknowledging the efficiencies afforded by new technology.

In a presentation that offered both hard statistics (450,000 books were available for sale in the English-speaking world in 2004) and sharp observations, Mr. Grafton spoke about the need for scholars to continue “to travel down two very different roads,” at least for the present. While offering a fast and encompassing way to tap into both primary and secondary resources, he wondered if the presence of the internet enabled writing (sometimes “a mass of ungainly, misspelled prose”) to become available to the public too soon. The need for “good editing,” he said, is greater than ever, and Harvard University’s recent adoption of a policy that requires faculty to put all their articles online is not necessarily a good thing. “Robert Darnton has drunk the open access Kool-Aid,” he observed, referring to the former Princeton professor who now heads the Harvard libraries and is an outspoken advocate of online publishing.

Reflecting on his own experiences as an editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, Mr. Grafton suggested that the kind of editing that goes into producing a scholarly journal just isn’t available with online publication, which can turn into “blogs with footnotes.” The “cute textual monads” envisioned by Gregory Crane, creator of the online Perseus Project, he said, amount to “intellectual snack packs” which may damage one’s ability to pay sustained attention to longer texts. He was careful to point out that his comments had largely to do with research in the humanities, rather than the sciences, where immediacy and shared data are more critical to scholarly research.

Mr. Grafton admitted to using Wikipedia, which he described as “a great enterprise as long as it’s not taken too seriously.” He noted the discrepancies among various nationalities’ versions of this popular resource, describing the noteworthy accuracy of the German edition, and the obliviousness of the English to inconsistencies in their version. He concluded that the Italian Wikipedia is very … Italian.

His own new book, Codex in Crisis, was published in a limited edition of 250 copies by The Crumpled Press, a small alternative publisher specializing in beautifully-bound books with innovative texts. Alex Bick, who is both the head of the Crumpled Press and a graduate student at Princeton, introduced Mr. Grafton, and set the tone of Mr. Grafton’s old-vs.-new talk by noting that while the press’s books are hand-sewn, the laser-printer is the firm’s “best friend.” Mr. Grafton went on to describe The Crumpled Press as “an extraordinary enterprise,” that had produced his book “with an aesthetic sense that rejoices the eye.”

Mr. Grafton appeared to be startled when he was asked whether or not he would be willing to put his new book on the internet, once all the print copies had been sold. He referred the question to the equally startled-looking Mr. Bick, who finally said, “We’ll have to think about that.”

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