By Book or by Crook
February 17, 2011
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes in response to this entry on the future of the bookstore:
Books are not indestructible, but short of tossing them into a furnace or dropping them into an industrial shredder they are difficult to annihilate. Not so the electronic file. A single electromagnetic burst over the North American continent could erase every unprotected electronic file on every personal computer in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It need not be from an enemy attack either – the sun can generate powerful magnetic bursts. A civilization that considers the book obsolete and plans to base its literacy on text-files stored on Kindle-type devices is tempting the nemesis of a blue screen and nothing to read and no possibility of reconstituting the tradition.
In my own education, bookstores played an enormous role. I used to cut classes from Santa Monica High School in the afternoons to browse in the dusty second-hand book dealerships on Santa Monica Boulevard and the old Third Street Mall. Sometimes one or another of the Cunningham brothers came with me. The escape route from SAMOHI to Santa Monica proper entailed a risky dash across the pedestrian bridge over the Santa Monica Freeway, which was observed pretty regularly by faculty and administration. Once, coming back from a book-buying foray, I saw the Dean of Boys waiting for me on the high school end of the bridge. The Dean confronted me and asked what mischief I had been cultivating in the city. I opened the large brown-paper bag containing my purchases and showed him two volumes of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, half a dozen vintage issues of Galaxy (a science fiction magazine), and a tattered original American edition of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells. I could see that the Dean was suppressing his laughter. He told me that I had better “get to class before I was missed.” I never heard anything more about it.
I suspect that a good many of my students have never or have only infrequently been in a bookstore, not counting the campus bookstore.
