The Financial Times (February 27th) is reviewing a clutch of books about books, from the very desirable, but expensive, The Oxford Companion to the Book (£175) to Robert Darnton’s The Case for Books (PublicAffairs, £13.99).
“Were the printed page to vanish from existence tomorrow,” writes Tim Martin, “the two fat volumes of the new Oxford Companion to the Book ... might be a fitting eulogy ... Close-packed columns distil the work of nearly 400 scholars from across the world, covering everything from library destruction and optical character recognition to the role of humble bookworms (which are ‘not worms at all, but the larvae of beetles’ and which ‘may also supply valuable bibliographical evidence’).”
Robert Darnton has been mostly associated in recent years with criticism of the Google Book Project. “Darnton,” Martin writes, “devotes much of the book’s first part to setting out his reasoned objections to the Google judgment [its settlement with the Authors Guild on book digitisation in 2008], arguments that are built on scholarly scruples rather than partisan preference. Public institutions, in his view, are better guardians of knowledge than companies with shareholders to please. The form of libraries may change but they should, he says, remain libraries and not corporations: “Libraries were never warehouses of books ... They have always been and always will be centres of learning.”