Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

My friend Scott McLemee’s essay this week at Inside Higher Ed concerns the etiquette of bookshelves. Is it hypocrisy to place books one hasn’t read on shelves where casual visitors to one’s home may see them? A Time magazine blogger has suggested that it is, while an American Prospect blogger has suggested, contrariwise, that one ought to display unread books with special prominence, because they represent the readerly self one is aspiring to. A bystander might suspect that neither blogger has written without irony, but Scott takes each of them at his word, and points out that guilt about owning unread books is “a kind of guilt that no really bookish person would feel,” because intellectual curiosity leads one naturally into byroads, some of which inevitably turn out to be dead ends. If you are an open-minded reader, you’ll end up with books you once intended to read but haven’t so far and maybe, now that you know a little more about yourself and about the books in question, shouldn’t.

Should you therefore throw them out? From the comments at the end of Scott’s essay, it transpires that an important and enjoyable perquisite to having a library of one’s own is deciding what belongs in it and what doesn’t, and that different people decide the question differently. I’ve never worried about displaying books I haven’t read. “Have you really read all those?” sounds to me like a question that only illiterates ask. I find the discussion fascinating nonetheless, because lately I have been Throwing Books Out.

This does not come naturally, but I have no choice. It’s a question of limits. A larger apartment is unlikely, in the foreseeable future, and I realized a few weeks ago that if I were to buy that one last bookcase that I’d been planning on, the feng shui of my study would abruptly become prisonlike. The stacks of books clogging my study floor have nowhere to go, unless other books exit. There have been half a dozen trips to the Strand in the last couple of weeks, and several totebags’ worth of books have been cashiered.

I used to think of myself as a kind of Noah’s Ark of books. If I hadn’t read a book, all the more reason to keep it, because probably other people didn’t want to read it either, and it was in danger of vanishing from human memory unless I saved it. Narcissistic and crazy, I know. I am happy to say that in my maturity I find it kind of liberating and fun to destroy my collection. Paperbacks of lesser-known William Golding novels purchased at the town library booksale during high school? Don’t even cart them to the Strand; nobody wants them. Just bale them up with last week’s New York Times, and try not to think about the fact that you carried these books around with you unread for more years than you had lived through when you bought them.

Also fun: Selling off scholarly books that one acquired out of a sense of duty and which one had excused oneself from reading but not from continuing to own. Can I say something candid about the poems that eighteenth-century America left in manuscript for the late twentieth century to rediscover and print in scholarly editions? Most of them are wretched. Also, there’s a limit to the number of sailor’s narratives that even the most hardened Melvillean needs to read. Such discards are tricky, of course, because there’s not only ebb and flow but also cyclicality to one’s interests over time. Or, anyway, to mine. This is probably why I’m a journalist and not a proper academic. I really enjoy forgetting. It has become almost second nature with me to kill Caleb Crain in order to become him. (I have killed the Czech translator, the science journalist, the literature professor. Who next?) So why not throw out his books? The trouble is that sometimes one is later tempted to revisit one’s earlier self, and it would cause expense and hassle to have to repurchase two dozen books about, say, the Anglo-American rhetoric of sympathy in the early nineteenth century if some day one were to decide that one had something else to say about it. But there are a few places that I will not be returning to, and it seems clearer each year what sort of places those are.

Of course, the professionally unjustifiable books are often the ones I can’t bear to part with: the paperback about dinosaur physics, say, or the three slightly different versions of The Week-End Book (a miscellany of poems, songs, games, bird descriptions, and first-aid advice) dating from 1928, 1955, and 2005. I hesitate to catalog too specifically the books I have been getting rid of, because if I do someone will emerge to defend them. That’s why I get money for them at the Strand, after all. I will say, though, that as with Scott, the selection process for me doesn’t have that much to do with how I want others to see me. The underlying principle seems to be the kind of work and play I am looking forward to.

For several years, I owned two out of the four volumes of an edition of an important twentieth-century writer-philosopher, who shall remain nameless here because he is long dead and innocent of the crime I am about to describe. Recently, having been paid and feeling flush, I decided to buy the two volumes missing from my collection. Since Amazon and the publisher’s own website list the volumes as still in print, I elected to buy the books new. A portion of my cash was transferred electronically to Amazon; I waited patiently by my mailbox; and in due time, a brown cardboard box arrived.

But woe came to Brooklyn with that cardboard box. There was no trouble with volume 1. Like the volumes I already owned, its pages were fine in texture and cream in color, the binding was sewn, and the printing of the type crisp and clear. Not so volume 2. Its pages, by contrast, were bluish and flimsy, its binding was by glue, and the printing . . . Oh, the printing was the worst part. The illustrations were textureless, as if they had been photocopied, the ink was blobby on the page, and the type was filmy and inexact, so that the thick parts of letters were thicker than they ought to be, and the thin parts dropped out altogether.

It was clear what had happened. Volume 2 had gone out of print. And to put it back in print, the publishers had hired a print-on-demand service. Inside hard covers deceptively similar to those of the other volumes, the publisher had stuck a text block that was only a shoddy knock-off of what ought to have been there. But, reader, they charged full price.

I returned the volume to Amazon, after having selected from the drop-down menu “Product performance/quality is not up to my expectations.” And now I haunt the online booksellers, writing to them plaintive requests to take down the volume from their shelves before they sell it to me, and to answer me, Is the binding sewn? Are the pages clearly printed? Someday, I hope, I shall find the volume I am in search of, in its true form.

Bruised by the experience, I became alert to clues that I had not noticed before. Leafing through the stacks of books in my study, I recall the illegible numerals in a monograph from a university press, and indeed, it seems to have suffered the same changeling swap, sometime between its first and its second printing. In a bookstore, I pick up a paperback issued by a very-tony publisher, and selling for $20; the eye rebels against the out-of-focus type; it is printed no more carefully than a Xeroxed coursepack.

Publishers of the world, did you need to give your customers another reason to distrust you? If you are going to sell us shoddy goods, couldn’t you lower the price? Couldn’t you let us know? I do not like a print-on-demand title, but I do not mind it if I know that that’s what I’m purchasing, and if the price corresponds. But to farce print-on-demand slurry between prestigious-seeming cloth covers—who do you think shells out hard cash for nice editions? People who don’t care about books?

UPDATE (Feb. 20): The world may not in fact be coming to an end, it turns out. Last week, in response to an email that I sent around the time I wrote this blog entry, I received a polite and very informative reply from someone responsible for design and production at the university press in question. This person wrote that yes, indeed, the volume I had purchased was on lower-quality paper than its siblings, and the printing was digital whereas its siblings had had offset printing. In fact, he further explained, the printing on the objectionable volume was worse than digital printing usually is, because it wasn’t printed from “live” PDF files but from scans of an earlier printing. “This was not a good decision on our part,” he wrote.

There were a couple of pieces of good news in his message. Only about 300 copies of a print run of nearly 9,000 were flawed the way mine was; the bad decisions were part of a one-time stopgap measure. And the glue binding that I objected to was a “cold melt” binding, also known as a double-fan binding, that is in fact stronger and more durable than Smyth-sewn binding.