Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

In this week’s New Yorker, D.T. Max has an article entitled “Final Destination,” about the massive literary archives located at the University of Texas at Austin. The collection includes “thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects.” Writers included in the archive range from DeLillo to Byron, Milton to Mailer (and hundreds of others). All of this is kept under the watchful eye of Tom Staley, housed at the aptly named Ransom center. Because even though the university has treasures which scholars and writers the world over would be incredibly eager to see and gain access to, Staley refuses to digitize or put online any of the collection. Why? Because apparently not being able to sniff the manuscripts would ruin the whole experience. Writes Max: “[Staley] does not want to place the Ransom’s archives online. He believes, quoting Matthew Arnold, that ‘the object as in itself it really is’ can never be replaced by a digital reproduction. ‘Smell this,’ he told me one time when I was in his office, as he picked up a manuscript box from the Edwardian British publisher Cecil Palmer. We inhaled the scent: tobacco, mold, dust. ‘See, there’s information in the smell, too,’ he said.”

Yes, I get it; some of the manuscripts have an extra sensory dimension of either smell or touch that would be lost if viewed online. Fine. But in terms of literary archives, what’s surely more important are the words: which ones were crossed out and which were kept, how they were formed and what did it take to hammer them into shape. So while feeling Graham Greene’s letters in my hands would be great, reading them on a screen would be just fine. And to refuse to make the material more widely available, just because the occasional batch has an element that wouldn’t translate digitally, is madness. Books are themselves facsimiles of what the writers originally wrote. The End of the Affair doesn’t lose anything because it’s a Penguin Paperback and not Greene’s original manuscript. For Staley to refuse to digitize the collection, or even electronically archive it, shows that he’d rather play literary keep-away than celebrate the works of the great authors whose papers he has acquired.

The New Yorker: “Final Destination”