By WILLIAM PANNAPACKER [Chronicle of Higher Education] – Contrary to many futuristic projections—even from bibliophiles who, as a group, enjoy melancholy reveries—the recent technological revolution has only deepened the affection that many scholars have for books and libraries, and highlighted the need for the preservation, study, and cherishing of both.
I’ve been gathering books for as long as I can remember. But I became a self-conscious book collector only in graduate school, when I lived amid dozens of secondhand shops in Cambridge, Boston, and the wider orbit of New England. Some of those shops survive, but many were closing toward the end of the 90s, with the rise of the Internet. Like many book lovers, I lamented that change.
Nevertheless, the 90s were an exciting time to be a bibliophile. The appearance of online dealers and services such as AbeBooks.com and eBay suddenly made millions of books available. Instead of searching through obscure book barns on the back roads of New Hampshire, you could locate exactly the book you wanted and receive it in the mail within a week. Even while hundreds of classic texts were becoming available online, free of charge, I found that I was buying more books than ever before. Instead of randomly acquiring volumes that I happened to find, I was building comprehensive collections in multiple subject areas: No bookish desire went unfulfilled for long.
Continued at The Chronicle of Higher Education | More Chronicle & Notices.
