A quick note about two books I read this past week:
The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime by Miles Harvey is the story of a man named Gilbert Bland, Jr., who stole hundreds of antique maps from libraries by slicing them out of atlases with a razor, tucking them under his shirt, and walking out. He was eventually caught, and Miles Harvey wants to make his story dramatic, important, and meaningful. In the 1990s, antique map collecting exploded from a relatively inexpensive hobby practiced by a few pale and nearsighted devotees into a trade so lucrative it made stealing pages from old books a highly remunerative, relatively low-risk criminal pursuit, and that's an interesting story. Unfortunately, it's a story quickly told, and Harvey's effort to pump up what was originally a magazine article into a 350-page book (and justify the four years he spent on the project) requires a great deal of filler. A long chapter on Bland's Vietnam service concludes inconclusively: "[I] discovered no unmistakable channel linking Bland's experience in Vietnam with his cartographic crime spree" (215). We call that a reserach dead end, MIles, and it doesn't belong in the book. I skimmed a heck of a lot starting along about chapter four in this one.
The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski blasts apart ideas we take for granted about how books are stored. This history of the development of the bookshelf is full of fascinating stuff about what libraries looked like in the days when a scroll was a book and a book was a codex, or when books were so rare and expensive that a well-stocked library might own a few dozen, and they were each chained to a desk for readers to use in situ. Artwork such as medieval woodcuttings is examined for proof that the idea of shelving books spine out is a relatively modern invention, which I continue to have trouble believing. Isn't shelving books spine out a law of nature?
Petroski's examination of the various ways collections of books can be organized showed me some of the advantages of a system I understand is still practiced in parts of Europe, in which books are shelved not by subject but by acquisition date. I've heard of this before, and it always seemed flat-out wrong to me, but which I now understand allows libraries to reclaim the space that is wasted by leaving room on each shelf for new acquisitions to be inter-filed and also avoids the cost and trouble of periodically having to re-shelf entire collections that have used up all the available space. I suppose my partner David, a former librarian, would have been less surprised by much in Petroski's book, but it was an eye-opener for me.
Posted by Su Penn at April 27, 2003 09:27 PM | TrackBack