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When life gets too stressful and I just need a break, I retreat into a book.
Books have always been my safe space. I have read more books than I can count, and the good ones more than once.
These days however, to be accurate, I should say I “read” a lot of books. Those inverted commas sadly mark a move away from relaxation to utility.
In other words, I find myself reading the beginning and the end, and only surfing the rest, focusing on chapters related to something I need to know.
Andrew Pettegrew’s The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading (2023) is an exception. I have read it all, because it offers a different lens through which to look at some contemporary problems.
Pettegrew reminds us that books should not be easily dismissed. The ideas they contain can literally shape the world, either when they were first published, or later on.
Most strikingly, he associates books (and reading) with war, observing that the fiercest wars in history have been between the most literate societies. Books focus and communicate ideas to large numbers of people, across distances and generations, which makes them dangerous.
He points out how libraries (and the books they contain) were military targets in ancient times. Nor was this merely a symbolic action. In a manuscript world, sacking or burning their libraries struck right at the core of a culture’s identity by taking away what they knew.
Libraries are repositories of accumulated knowledge and wisdom. More than simply spots to park information, they are (more importantly) places where we learn what it means.
The Renaissance grew out of libraries, as scholars found and translated copies of classic literature, sometimes finding only one manuscript, and then multiplied that knowledge and wisdom through printing.
But while the book industry is booming today, as electronic tools lower barriers to publication, libraries of physical books are an endangered species.
To be clear, by “library” I don’t mean that pile of beach books, culled from garage or rummage sales, read and tossed back — a kind of intellectual catch and release.
I mean that shelf of treasured books, perhaps passed down through generations, but kept because at some time they mattered. Bookshelves used tell us a lot about the owners; I always scanned what my professors collected, the moment I stepped into their offices.
Yet, as anyone who has helped elders move out of their homes into a smaller space will understand, that interest in books and libraries is waning. Worse, what should be valued among those old collections is not.
The Winnipeg Public Library upfront declines any offers for its public holdings; both the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba in theory would consider donations, but (on enquiry) they are equally uninterested.
Libraries everywhere are culling their shelves, disposing of volumes (outdated or not used lately), mostly to landfills. We soon will be left with workstations and spacious rooms, not shelves on which repose the knowledge of past generations.
For my own research, I buy a lot of books — and have to fend off suggestions to use the library instead by observing libraries buy very few books these days. E-journals don’t have to be shelved, and don’t get chewed by rodents or soaked by a leaky window.
But in the past I have done much of that research by randomly reading through library shelves, constantly frustrated by cataloguing systems that always hid the things most wanted. Instead of finding the expected, I discovered things I didn’t know were there, and so thrived. I have pulled down volumes that had not been taken out since the card was glued in the back in the 1930s, and found gems.
You could easily argue that public libraries were the foundation of modern industrial society. They were important because of the universal access that was allowed to people who wanted to learn, to find things out, but who did not have the means to pay for it or to otherwise gain access.
The Wright brothers knew nothing about the young science of aeronautics, so they took books out of the Smithsonian. Thomas Edison and his crew of researchers constantly looked through libraries, and compiled their own at Menlo Park. The key military and political figures of the last 200 years had large numbers of books in their personal libraries. Any society that wanted to compete needed that knowledge available to the general public, not just in the hands of an elite. So, there were Mechanics Institutes in the U.K., where the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge made sure there were books and libraries available to everyone, especially the workers.
I have always been fascinated by the story of Andrew Carnegie, whose fortunes were founded upon the free access to books and libraries given to him by wealthy patrons. So, when he made his billions, one of his key philanthropic decisions was to give funds for public libraries. Matched by a land grant and agreement by local authorities to support ongoing operations, more than 2,500 Carnegie libraries were built between 1883 and 1929. (There were 125 in Canada alone, three in Winnipeg, for example, and one in Selkirk.)
Libraries, however, are not neutral spaces. There are wars about ideas today, and libraries (and the books they contain) are ammunition. I could write my own book about the latest salvos fired in the rewriting of history. But every conflict has to contend with what has already been written down as “facts” — there is a core of ideas, accounts, and other historical documents that forms the bedrock of any dispute.
That is, at least until those “facts” are dumped, shredded or otherwise disposed of, as unnecessary, outdated or inconvenient. As our libraries turn into electronic access points, we risk “defactualizing” not only our own history, but gutting the ideas, knowledge and wisdom of past generations to suit whatever some e-mogul of the moment wants us to believe.
If the core of past cultures was to be found in their libraries, then what of ours? What if an electromagnetic pulse attack (one of the earliest salvos in any serious 21st century war) or some cyberattack on our systems can erase them all in an instant? What would we do if all that knowledge was simply gone?
For example, while clearing out of my basement, I came across old paper maps, and even some “TripTiks” (remember those?) of road trips we took years ago. My first impulse was disposal, because I can always look these things up electronically, but my second impulse was to keep them.
Pettegrew tells stories of how the Americans were hamstrung during the Second World War by a lack of knowledge of the Pacific, needing maps and information, and how the British military was forced to plan attacks on Norway based on an old Baedeker tour guide, because they had no other information at hand.
Once the physical evidence is gone, how will we even know when the story has been changed, as well as its interpretation? While I grant that old(er) age becomes a challenge in terms of memory, I am often troubled by something I find on-line not squaring with my recollection from some earlier time. Without the books to double-check, how will I know whether (for example) Jan. 6 was really just a party that got out of hand, if that’s what the internet tells me?
February is “I Love to Read” month. Buy a book, even if the library can’t.
Peter Denton writes, often surrounded by books, from his home in rural Manitoba.
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