In some manner or another, I have been involved in the world of books, in the broadest definition of those words, virtually all my life; a galaxy of books, a universe of words, painted, printed, or otherwise: words within worlds.
The word: from the beginning, the word was there, and I read it, revered it, and devoured it. Later, my childhood appetite for reading broadened into a desire to collect books, as well as read them. My books opened up vast imaginative horizons to my view, and I also came to love them as physical objects—I began to appreciate their bindings and design, their illustrations and typography, as well as their content. I looked at them, fondled them, and inhaled them. If there was a God, his name was Biblio, although in those early years I would not have known what that word meant.
In the last fifty years, my roles in the book world have included reader, collector, new bookseller, antiquarian book dealer, publisher, editor, occasional writer, and always champion of the printed world in all its myriad manifestations. In these early years of the 21st century, there has been an awful lot of talk about “the death of the book.” What is being forgotten in this dialogue is that devotees of the book have always been on the margins of society—in modern society, book lovers are about as mainstream as druids. Whether two thousand years ago in the great lost library of Alexandria, half a millennium ago in Gutenberg’s time, or at any time and place since human beings first articulated their thoughts on clay, stone, and papyrus, those of us involved in these matters have always lived in some far distant corner of the universe: worlds of worlds far from mainstream society.
There has been a great upheaval in information distribution in the last few decades that is accelerating as we speak. No one now living on the planet knows where it will end up. Google, Wikipedia, the world wide web, Kindle, e-books, print on demand, and the next new thing threaten to extinguish the old-fashioned book. Perhaps. I think not: the transformation will continue. The value of books transcends the informational, and while some of us in the bookworld will become extinct, the rest of us will always be here, wherever here is, in the far-off reaches, in the margins, doing what we have always done: loving books, keeping Biblio alive in the world.