The Book Mechanic

December 6, 2009: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Book-Mechanic/49310/

The Book Mechanic A modern sensibility binds Terry Belanger to old, rare volumes

Tom Cogill for The Chronicle Review Terry Belanger, founder of Rare Book School, argues that the rapid development of digital technologies is one reason we need to study old books. By Andrew Witmer

Some years ago, Terry Belanger found a striking way to reveal the reverence that many citizens of the digital age continue to feel for old books. It is a sentiment he finds fascinating but only rarely appropriate or useful. Belanger, who retired in September as director of an educational institute called Rare Book School but who continues to teach there, brings an old volume to class, speaks about its binding and typography, and then, still discussing the book, rips it in half and tears it into pieces. As his horrified students watch in disbelief, Belanger tosses the shards into a nearby trash can and murmurs, "Bibliography isn't for sissies."

It is a brilliant piece of classroom theater. In one transgressive act, Belanger lays bare the pieties of his students and stakes out his own more pragmatic relationship with old books.

The emotional ties that many of us have to books, which have long been treasured as beautiful objects, repositories of wisdom, or instigators of revolution, are clearly nothing new. But now the book seems besieged. As computers and other digital technologies claim more of our work and leisure time, we are told with increasing frequency that

the book is in crisis and could be replaced. That possibility may not seem particularly troubling to the many Americans who celebrate the remarkable processing power of digital technologies and rapidly form loving relationships with their iPods, laptops, and Kindles. For its partisans, however, the book has gained an increasing allure as the symbol of a more-reflective, less-wired cultural life.

What is too often forgotten is that the book itself is a remarkable technology, easily one of the most socially significant in human history. Amazingly, books are still among our most reliable tools for preserving information. They never give you an error message or fail to open because of incompatibility with newer technologies. If you want your descendants to read your memoirs, you're smarter to leave them a book than a disk. Both the euphoric embrace of digital technologies and the haze of nostalgia for the book have obscured its technological nature, propagating the notion that the meeting between the book and the computer pits the pretechnological against the technological. Any triumph for one is viewed as a loss for the other. Without denying that digitization poses serious new challenges for the book, one can argue that that perspective is deeply flawed.

Few people are better prepared to explain why than Belanger, who has spent his career teaching others how to study the book as a physical object, as a form of technology, and as the product of many other technologies. It turns out that doing so has profound consequences. It has made Belanger receptive to the use of digital technologies in the study of the book and inspired his innovative approaches to collecting and teaching. It has also been the core insight behind the transformation that he and his students have brought to the field of rare books over the past several decades.

Belanger, a 2005 MacArthur fellow, founded Rare Book School 26 years ago at Columbia University as a summer training program for rare-book librarians and collectors. He subsequently moved the program to the University of Virginia and began offering classes year-round. Everything about Rare Book School, including its founder, challenges the sort of dualism that ignores the technological nature of the book.

Far from an aesthete or a tweed-jacketed technophobe, Belanger is a gregarious, grease-stained mechanic who insists on popping the hood and poking around inside to see how books work, enthusiastically using digital diagnostics when helpful. Rare Book School is his garage, the place where, in consultation with a steady stream of colleagues and apprentices, he tears books apart to see how they run. During the summer of 2008, an assignment for Virginia's Institute for Public History gave me the opportunity to observe the school's operations from the inside. Course offerings that summer included seminars on the history of typography, the history of bookbinding, and the identification of photographic print processes.

One of the first things you notice about Belanger is his attention to detail. As director of the school, he seemed to care about even the most mundane aspects of life in its sprawling suite of offices. That fastidiousness could be both irritating and endearing to his small staff. No one likes to have the boss unceremoniously remove a broom from

their hands so he can show them how to sweep the floor more efficiently. On the other hand, Belanger's zeal for the quotidian often led him to pitch in on projects well below his pay grade. When a 1998 renovation required hours of backbreaking labor scraping paint and grout from an office floor, Belanger himself did most of the work, accompanied only by the strains of his favorite operas blasting from a sound system. One day, he wrote school supporters, he listened to Bellini's Il Pirata seven times because his hands were too dirty to change the CD.

His concern for detail centers on functionality, a passion that usually overwhelms other considerations. A friend tells the story of meeting Belanger for lunch in a crowded restaurant only to find their table wobbling annoyingly from side to side. Belanger cleared the table, flipped it over, tightened a few screws, turned the table upright, and calmly resumed his lunch.

In the humanities, where facility with ideas and abstractions is the paramount virtue, it is unusual to find someone so concerned, even consumed, with materiality. But such interest is the key to understanding everything that Belanger and Rare Book School have accomplished, for it drives not only the way floors are swept but also the way books are examined. Belanger and his colleagues care as much about a book's covers as its contents. For them, an essential part of a book's character is its physicality, and the study of books must therefore include careful analysis of the materials from which they are made and the engineering that determines their functioning. If such concerns are unusual now, they were even more so at the beginning of Belanger's career.

When Belanger fell into a job teaching humanities literature at Columbia University's School of Library Service in the early 1970s, he knew virtually nothing about librarianship. That was because his doctoral training at Columbia had been in English literature. He was offered the job in the library school only after another instructor fell ill three days before the semester began. Belanger was fascinated by the history of books and printing, however, and familiar with the field of descriptive bibliography, where the physical characteristics of books are assessed as carefully as their textual content. Before long he borrowed some printing equipment and founded the Book Arts Press, where he and a small group of students began teaching themselves how to print with a press and moveable type.

As he acquired more equipment and expertise, Belanger built laboratory sessions into descriptive-bibliography courses, and in 1974 he started a pathbreaking master's program in rare-book librarianship at Columbia. Word began to spread that graduates of Belanger's program possessed technical skills and knowledge that other rarebook librarians often lacked. Columbia graduates could identify rare books by region and date simply by examining their bindings and typefaces. Their impressive array of what Belanger calls "janitorial skills" made them attractive hires.

Belanger's accomplishment was to train a generation of rare-book librarians to attend as carefully to how books are made as to what they say. The cadre of scholars, librarians, and booksellers who coalesced around the Book Arts

Press asked new questions about the book. Their research into the history of bookbinding, papermaking, illustration techniques, and typography allowed them to study and care for their collections far more skillfully.

While their approach was attractive to some, it was alarming to others. The retired book dealers and English professors who had ruled the cloistered world of rare-book librarianship ever since rare-book departments began appearing in American university libraries toward the end of the 19th century had never seen anything quite like Belanger and his graduates. One point of concern was their new, highly technical approach to the preservation and study of rare books. Another was Belanger himself.

Opinionated and ambitious, Belanger soon became known as the enfant terrible of the book world. In a field with more than its share of shrinking violets, Belanger's assertiveness was exceptional. He savored the roles of ringmaster and impresario. For several years, he commissioned and collected caricatures of himself, then sent out Christmas cards featuring his favorites. He enjoyed his notoriety as a maverick and welcomed conflict. To this day he describes himself as something of a street fighter. "Major universities do not run on a principle of sweetness and light," he told me when I asked about one particularly fierce battle over institutional financing. "Major universities react to being kicked in the balls." As much as it is possible for a librarian to swagger, Belanger swaggered.

Just as alarming to the establishment was his growing influence. As his students rose through the ranks of the library world, they began hiring other Columbia graduates and taking leadership roles in prestigious institutions and professional organizations. Belanger worked hard to strengthen that network, using it to spread his ideas and place his mark on his field.

By the early 1980s, Belanger had decided to take the approach to the study of the book he had developed and make it the basis of an innovative training program. Rare Book School opened in 1983 at Columbia before relocating to Charlottesville in 1992.

The program has proved to be his most significant contribution to the field of rare books. More than 4,000 students have attended one or more classes, and nearly every special-collections librarian in the country has visited the school at least once.

To enter the world of Rare Book School, as several hundred librarians, collectors, and scholars do every year, traveling from around the world to participate in the school's intensive five-day seminars, is to be bombarded with nonstop reminders that the history of the book is a history of technological innovation. In one seminar that I observed, James Mosley, an expert on printing, described the work of 18th-century punch-cutters who cut letters in steel, for whom a slip of the knife and injury could mean the loss of a week's activity. Belanger's course on illustration techniques featured laboratory sessions in which students tried their hand at etching. Nearly every course gave students opportunities to handle rare materials.

Rare Book School supports such hands-on classes with a huge and unusual collection of books and prints. No other rare-book collection in the world looks quite like it. The difference stems from Belanger's passion for function over form. Not surprisingly, given the fact that physical condition plays a key role in determining a book's monetary value, few collectors are interested in buying "dogs," volumes with torn covers, ripped pages, or other imperfections. Belanger prefers "dogs." Under his care, the school's collection gradually became the animal shelter of the rare-book world, the place where other collectors could leave their damaged books and walk away with an easy conscience.

The reason Rare Book School finds these castoffs so valuable is the same reason no one else wants them—their physical deterioration. For Belanger, cracked bindings and frayed covers offer useful windows into the guts of a book, making it easier to show students how a book is put together. Moreover, a damaged book can be dissected without compunction, its leaves placed in plastic sleeves and passed around a classroom to exemplify typefaces or illustration techniques. Belanger likes to say that Rare Book School collects "dandelions rather than roses," and told me that for those who study flowers, "dandelions can be every bit as useful as roses, and if you can lovingly pick them apart in the interest of your education, they're considerably more valuable than roses."

Belanger despises the tendency of some of his colleagues in the world of rare books to allow their fondness for books to become an undiscriminating fetish of form over function. He calls that "pretty-book syndrome" and works hard to guard against it by emphasizing the prosaic aspects of working with rare books and playing down the spiritual satisfactions. As he likes to quip, "Librarianship is not all glamour."

This emphasis on functionality reflects Belanger's personality, but it also stems from his clear-eyed assessment of the future of rare books in a digital age, and it forms part of his strategy for carving out room for their continuing study. In a 1991 lecture, Belanger predicted that rare books would soon begin disappearing from shelves as digitization allowed libraries to get out of the costly and labor-intensive "permanent paper-storage business." That threat persists nearly two decades later, and has been accelerated by Google's work digitizing and making available online tens of thousands of out-of-copyright books owned by major American research libraries.

Belanger has been quick to proclaim the powerful new research capabilities possessed by digital technologies. For him, the encounter between the book and the computer is not always a zero-sum game. Digital tools have proved enormously valuable for research into the history of the book as a physical object, facilitating both collection and analysis.

"I see the Web and everything it stands for as being an immense improvement over our old arrangements," he told me. "It's absurd to sit around sentimentalizing about the decline of the book in the face of the kind of knowledge that the Web now gives us, and the research it allows us to do." Rare Book School spends about a third of its annual

collecting budget on eBay purchases, and Belanger and his colleagues frequently use online databases and Google searches to track down information on obscure books and authors.

Eschewing the false opposition between technology and the book, Belanger has brilliantly made the rapid development of new digital technologies one of his leading arguments for the preservation of rare books. He contends that future generations, who may produce many fewer books than we do, deserve to see for themselves what all the fuss was about—deserve to hold in their own hands and look for themselves at the objects that have delighted, enraged, and shaped the world.

Belanger also argues that the new technologies and analytical techniques that will be developed in the future will produce fresh insights into the construction and functioning of books only when applied to original materials. Because so much information about a physical object is lost in photographic duplication, future students of the book will be at a profound disadvantage if they can examine only digital reproductions. "They need their own shot at the past from original materials in the same way that we did," Belanger argues. "Each generation needs to rediscover the past in its own way, using its own improved technology for that purpose." Or, in the pithy formulation one often hears around Rare Book School, "The future deserves a past."

Support for that view can be found in the work of the Archimedes Palimpsest project. Over the past decade, researchers at the Walters Art Museum, in Baltimore, have used sophisticated new digital tools, including multispectral imaging, X-ray fluorescence imaging, and optical character recognition, to decipher the previously unreadable text of the medieval manuscript containing the only extant copies of two important treatises by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Without either computers or an original copy of the manuscript, those texts would have been lost forever.

Belanger's arguments amount to an impassioned but limited defense of preserving some books because of their significance in understanding the history of culture. Research on the Archimedes Palimpsest, for example, is changing our understanding of the early history of Western science. Similarly, original editions of the novels of Charles Dickens offer a fascinating window into the world of Victorian serial publication, print technology, and mass culture.

The case for rare books stops far short of broader arguments enumerating the virtues of the book and warning about the consequences of its possible demise. Belanger finds the current drumbeat of alarm over the "crisis of the book" to be overblown and unhelpful. He believes that books do certain things well and digital technologies do other things well. The two should coexist without trying to eliminate each other. If an Audubon print is best viewed in the original rather than in digital reproduction, that is no reason to maintain that information created digitally and intended for digital viewing would be improved by taking on physical dimensions.

Belanger realized long ago that not all rare books are likely to survive the current wave of digitization, but he is usually too busy harnessing digital technologies for his own bibliographical purposes to worry much about it. That kind of pragmatism may be one of the best ways forward in the fight to retain interest in the preservation and study of rare books. Belanger told me that he has struggled throughout his career to "desanctify the notion that a book is a holy object" because he believes that "we have a better chance of saving books if people see that they have a use than if they are simply religious objects." Convinced that sentiment and veneration are not stable grounds upon which to build an academic field, Belanger wants rare-book libraries to be seen as laboratories, not shrines. If dissecting a few books publicly will help make the point, he's happy to oblige. Andrew Witmer is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Humanities Forum. From September 2008 to May 2009, he was a postdoctoral fellow in U.S. history at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.