Old books continue to wield peculiar power

Star Tribune
April 11, 2001
Katherine Kersten

In the wake of the digital revolution, we often hear that the age of the book is passing. And yet, in certain respects, we seem to be witnessing a growing fascination with books. Amazon.com is all the rage, of course, as are the new megabookstores with their cozy cafes. But the real surprise -- heartwarming to book lovers -- is the growing interest in old books, the sort of volumes that our great-grandparents treasured.
Evidence of this reviving interest is all around us. The Minnesota Center for Book Arts has a beautiful new facility in Minneapolis, which offers popular classes in traditional bookmaking crafts for both adults and children. In Stillwater, Loome Antiquarian Booksellers -- a spectacular store housing more than 150,000 mostly out-of-print volumes -- has just opened to wide acclaim. Browsers could wander there, entranced, for days.

Why this new interest in old books? In part, it seems to be a response to the flood of electronic information that sometimes threatens to overwhelm us. Today, a schoolchild writing a report on Ulysses Grant generally downloads the details he needs from the Internet, and tosses the printout in the wastebasket when he is finished. We expect to discard most information, like nearly everything else in our throwaway society, once we have consumed it.

Books are different -- we usually plan to keep them. Yet there's a great difference between a paperback Penguin Classic edition of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" and the copy of the novel that your great-grandmother might have received for her birthday in 1910. The contemporary book's thin paper cover curls after a first reading. But the older book -- made with permanence in mind -- is a thing of beauty, with a heavy cloth cover, decorated endpapers and engraved illustrations.

Why did our ancestors lavish attention on so many of the books they made? Because they planned to return to them repeatedly, both to find pleasure and to partake of the wisdom between their covers.

Today, most artifacts from bygone eras, like butter churns and whalebone corsets, are merely quaint museum pieces. Old books' peculiar power over us derives from the fact that they are an artifact that we can use in exactly the same way -- and for the same purposes -- that our ancestors did. For this reason, books may be the most direct "way back" we have to the world of our forebears.

Kristi Wermager, a special collections librarian at Carleton College, sees examples of this every day. She tells, for instance, of a class of Latin students who were reading the poet Horace. When Wermager showed them a "schoolboy" edition of the poet, printed in the early 19th century, they were transfixed. The youngster who had owned the book had filled its margins with scribbled notes; as a result, the students felt that they could actually see his mind at work. For young people raised with little sense of history, it was a powerful moment of connection with the past, allowing them to "touch" the cultural tradition from which their world sprang.

Old books that are particularly valuable are generally designated as rare books. The Twin Cities is home to a number of collections of such books, among them the Bakken Library's books on the history of electricity and the University of Minnesota's Kerlan Collection of children's books and manuscripts.

One of the most outstanding of these collections belongs to the Athenaeum, which was founded in Minneapolis in 1859 as a fee-for-membership library. The Athenaeum owns five extraordinary collections, including books on the history of printing, the exploration of the Midwest, and natural history. Its holdings range from rare editions of Aesop's Fables to four stunning 1830s volumes of Audubon's "Birds of America" and to hand-painted children's botany books from the late 18th century.

Today, few Minnesotans know of the Athenaeum's treasures. But the organization's board plans to change that. Though Athenaeum books are now accessible by appointment only, the organization will have its own exhibit space in the new Minneapolis Public Library, which is scheduled to open in 2006.

In 2009, the Athenaeum will celebrate its 150th anniversary. Board members are working to ensure that, by that time, the organization will be a vital part of Twin Cities cultural life. Their plans include regularly scheduled lectures, book awards, activities for students, and poetry and story readings. They also aspire to make the Athenaeum a meeting place for local rare book collectors.

Next week the Athenaeum will inaugurate its plans to reach the public with a lecture at 7 p.m. April 20 at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Stan Tikiela, a noted local author and naturalist, will speak on Minnesota birds, and some of the Athenaeum's exquisite natural history books will be on display.

Why all this effort to bring the Athenaeum's treasures to the public? Jack Parker, chairman of the organization's board, articulates the vision this way: "We are part of the continuum of an extraordinary cultural tradition. It is our duty to pass on these beautiful things to those who wish to receive them."

-Katherine Kersten is a director of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.