An old book, a modest old book, warped red cloth covers curving protectively around the brittle pages, with a retiring polka-dotted border and no title, no external identification at all save for the stickers added to the spine by a librarian or archivist:
I was careful with it, when it was handed me by the Digital Content Group man; he watched me rather narrowly at first, but seemed satisfied by the way I treated it. I have been around old books since I was a child, borrowed them, bought them, read them. I know how to handle them. I respect those unadorned covers with the fraying corners. They have done their work well.
But the book is old, published in 1882. The verso of the title page proclaims in purple dye-stamped lettering that the Wisconsin Historical Society received the book December 17, 1895. Its pages were cut fairly neatly, which is a blessing, since not all books were so kindly treated. Even so, the pages are grey, and their top edges are starting to ravel and crumble.
Ireland under the Land Act proclaims the title page in a well-spaced all-caps serif, the rest of the page in restrained, modest variants on all-caps and small-caps, save for the regal touch of “London” in faux-blackletter, and the brief, mild italic copyright statement. The printer’s mark, in contrast, is a wild, whimsical W-shaped flower-ark built on a serif C, presumably for the publisher Chatto & Windus.
Law books are given to these weird little touches, I have found. When I was proofreading the Hispanic Seminary’s transcription of an old Aragonese fuero years ago, I was captivated by the bizarre cartoons in the margins, of people and beasts and half-people-half-beasts shooting arrows and throwing stones at each other. Scribes get bored, and doodle. I expect some of my old DTDs or (horrors!) SGML instances hold some less-than-wholly-temperate comments relating to problems with the data modeling or the transcription.
Someone with more sensitive fingers than I have might be able to read this book blindfolded, the printing has so dented the pages. Not smooth, these pages, not at all, not around the edges and not on the printed surface. Do people who whinge about the “feel of the paper book” have any idea about this? I doubt it.
My job? Proofreading the OCR and sharpening up the existing TEI markup for the electronic edition of this book. Not a difficult job; it’s got some tables (including one gigantic one that will take me some hours to capture correctly), but it’s nothing I didn’t do for Liberty Fund, a few jobs back. (I can browse their library and see my own work there—not directly, more’s the pity, but transformed into HTML. It’s my work, though. I like seeing my own work.)
I’m rescuing this book. I’m renewing it. Materially, it is a modest thing; it exists for the sake of the words, and the words are what I am recasting anew. So the old red covers don’t have to endure the touch of many hands, and the pages don’t have to risk crumbling altogether as they are turned. I preserve the words, and the intent of the artisans who put the words on the pages, as best I know how. This is, stripped to its essentials, what I do. I rescue the souls of modest old books for new readers and new uses.
And it irks the life out of me, turns me purple and speechless with fury, when people (more often than not, librarians!) loftily proclaim that I do this because I have no respect for the physical codex.
Respect goes two ways.
