For those of us who care passionately about the humanities, there are few questions more pressing than the future of the book. Coming generations, it seems today, may well live without them, consuming text on various electronic devices networked, in turn, to infinitely large digitized data bases. To some of us, this appears like a techno-utopia, having the entire library of world culture at our fingertips. To others, it is a more depressing vision, centered on the loss of the iconic artifact of learning. Not even Jorge Louis Borges, the great Argentinian fantasist of information overflow, conceived the scenario that is now plainly at hand.
Photos by Candida Höfer
There is no scholar whose work is more relevant to the fate of the book than Anthony Grafton. One of the greatest historians in the world today, the Princeton professor is the leading authority on the history of the book, having written the definitive accounts of its role in the shaping of the (early) modern world. His classic texts include such masterworks as Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers, Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West, and Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea.
But Grafton is not only known among admiring academics. His book The Footnote: A Curious History, was an enormous cross-over success, demonstrating that serious historiography can have real appeal to the larger public. As a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, moreover, Grafton regularly captures the imagination of a wide readership.
Photo by Candida Höfer
Grafton has spent most of his career thinking about the history of the book. In light of the recent technological revolutions, however, more and more of his attention has been devoted to its present and future. One of the results has been “Future Reading: Digitization and its Discontents,” a widely influential piece in The New Yorker. There, Grafton set the book’s electronic future into a compelling historical context, seeing it as part and parcel of a development that commenced in Mesopotamia when, in the third millennium B.C.E, scribes started to create collections of clay tablets. The concept of the library, with its physical objects harboring text, was born at that moment. And there is no-one better equipped than Grafton to assess whether there is a future, for the library or its contents.
Illustration by Tom Gauld
As a graduate student, I had the tremendously good fortune to earn a junior fellowship at Vienna’s International Research Center for Cultural Studies. Even more fortuitous was the fact that Anthony Grafton was there as a senior fellow. I spent much of 1996 in conversation with him, and the lessons I learned continue to stay with me, animating much of what I try to do in the area of public humanities. Grafton, in others words, is a real inspiration – and I am utterly thrilled that he will join us at the Chicago Humanities Festival in the fall. For me, his lecture will be an absolute highlight of the CHF – and I know that our audience will think so too.
Photo by Candida Höfer
A final word: the visit by Anthony Grafton is made possible by the generosity of Roger and Julie Baskes, two of the outstanding philanthropists in Chicago. For several years now, Roger and Julie have underwritten the Baskes Lecture, which has brought some of the world’s great historians to Chicago. Grafton will continue this wonderful tradition – and for that, we are gratefully indebted to Roger and Julie.
Art by David Levine
First United Methodist Church at The Chicago Temple: March 31, 2:00 PM
Tags: Anthony Grafton, books, future, technology, history
