The Library Of Babel Meets Fahrenheit 451

The Great Hall of the Library of Alexandria

Today the New York Times informs us that in California someone is building an archive that will supposedly hold, when it is completed, every single book published in the 20th Century. The Times says:

In a wooden warehouse in this industrial suburb, the 20th century is being stored in case of digital disaster.

Forty-foot shipping containers stacked two by two are stuffed with the most enduring, as well as some of the most forgettable, books of the era. Every week, 20,000 new volumes arrive, many of them donations from libraries and universities thrilled to unload material that has no place in the Internet Age. …

“We want to collect one copy of every book,” said Brewster Kahle, who has spent $3 million to buy and operate this repository situated just north of San Francisco. “You can never tell what is going to paint the portrait of a culture.”

Evidently, the Library of Congress, and the huge libraries of world’s colleges and universities won’t be up to the seemingly important task of preserving all the books of the past century. Even if they limit themselves to those in English. Just why all these books deserve to be saved is another impossible question to ponder. I spare you a recitation of a long list of entirely forgettable titles of no conceivable importance to anyone. But don't take my word for this. Visit any one of the big box bookstores and ask yourself, "How many of these books deserve to be preserved forever?" Ask yourself about the many books you won't even take off the shelf and open.

Is what is being built in California really just a physical documentation of the crassness and stupidity of the publishing industry? Isn't it as if the collection will merely demonstrate with its great heft how concentration in the publishing industry eventually destroyed the value, the quality, the diversity of books?

So now we have a very bizarre, very large collection of books (and now films and records and digitized books and who knows what else) growing in California. It’s as if something like Borges’s Library of Babel were the only available hedge against Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It's as if preserving many books with no value somehow assured the viability of the very rare important ones.

The thought of my two novels sitting in one of those trailers in the warehouse in California with thousands of other books doesn't exactly warm my heart. I think I completely accept the idea that within decades nobody at all will remember either of my books. I would be shocked if they did. And I don't see why, if their being forgotten is acceptable to me and those who read them, they should physically be preserved.

A New Gateway Drug

The New York Times isn't sure that "urban fiction" is such great stuff:

In one book, the hero spirals toward a violent death dealing drugs on the streets of Laurelton, Queens, witnessing, along the way, a baby ripped apart by bullets. In another, a convict plots the seduction of his prison psychotherapist.

And then there’s Angel, a Versace-clad seductress who shoots her boyfriend in the head during sex, stuffs money from his safe into her Louis Vuitton bags and, as she fondles the cash, experiences a sexual frisson narrated in terms too graphic to reproduce here.

All these characters, and the novels they populate, are favorites of Shonda Miller, 35, a devoted library-goer who devours a book a day, enforces a daily hour reading time for her entire family and scours street stands and the Internet for new titles. She also acts as an unofficial guide and field scout for the Queens Library as it builds its collection of a fast-growing genre, written mainly by black authors about black characters and variously known as urban fiction, street lit or gangsta lit.

It’s not the kind of literary fare usually associated with the prim image of librarians. But public libraries from Queens, the highest-circulation library system in the country, to York County in central Pennsylvania, are embracing urban fiction as an exciting, if sometimes controversial, way to draw new people into reading rooms, spread literacy and reflect and explore the interests and concerns of the public they serve.

So what. Once the reader finds something electrifying, exciting in a library, the chances for lifelong pursuit of reading and writing greatly increases. And that, I think, is good. After all, today's reader of Gangsta Fiction about drugs is about 2 yards away from reading Coleridge, Burroughs, and Hunter Thompson.