We Get Letters

A kind of odd thing happened on a recent evening in mid-March.  I was in the Washington, D.C., area and, unlike the New York Times, the Washington Post comes with Parade, that dinky, mostly junky magazine some newspapers circulate on Sundays.  I leafed through Parade as I was watching some TV before dinner that night.  The main subject that week was letter-writing and the main article was “Letters That Changed Our World” by Liz Welch.  It made me think of a conversation I’ve had with some friends and relatives recently.

In her article, which Welch sub-heads “The missives that move us, shake us and, sometimes, alter the course of history,” the author refers to a 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt which prompted the president to launch the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb.  She also writes about another letter to President Roosevelt, one written by Fidel Castro when he was 14 years old, “requesting $10 and Groucho Marx’s advice to Woody Allen.”  An illustration accompanying the article shows a note 23-year-old writer Eudora Welty, who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, sent to the New Yorker proclaiming, “How I would like to work for you!”  Welch also refers to a book, Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving a Wider Audience (Chronicle Books, 2014), which is an anthology of letters that reveal surprising aspects of historical events and figures.  All this is what made me recall my discussions.

I used to do research for scholars from universities outside New York, finding references and documents for them.  I used to do a lot of digging up of old letters sent from one historically important figure to another—Tennessee Williams’s and Elia Kazan’s letters were among the largest collections of correspondence through which I had to pore.  It’s made me think: What’s going to happen to collected letters for the generations of famous (not to mention the not-so-famous) people to come?  (I touched on this question in my ROT post “Books in Print,” 14 July 2010.)  First of all, most of their correspondence will be electronic—e-mails and tweets and texts—which may or may not even be saved, much less printed out on paper for filing in traditional archives.  (While letter-writing has declined, the average e-mail account sends or receives about 100 e-mails daily, according to one study.  Eighteen- to 29-year-old Americans send as much as 100 texts a day.)  E-mail is basically ephemeral; I know it can be saved, and offices and agencies are required to keep significant messages, but electronic communications are just evanescent.  What’s more, they can’t easily be passed along later to repositories like libraries.  As writer John Coleman expressed it, “Email is ‘permanent’ in its own way; our electronic messages are easy to keep and search in huge volumes.  But they aren’t tangible and enduring in the same way those old notes are.”

Second, even those old electronic letters and notes that are kept—on disks or hard drives somewhere—will eventually be impossible to access and read as the technology changes (which, in the computer world, can happen in a matter of a few years).  I already have old disks that I can’t read now, like old Betamax videotapes no one can play anymore unless you dig up an old machine.  (That’s not even counting the e-mails and other files I’ve plain lost from technical mishaps, like when I fried my hard drive years ago or when my last machine got a virus and I had to wipe the drive before transferring everything left to a new one.  I also changed e-mail providers a few years ago and lost all the old stash before I realized I could have transferred it.)

Since nearly no one writes letters much anymore—the postal service estimates that in 1987 the average household received a personal letter every two weeks, whereas by 2010 the average had dropped to once every seven weeks—there’s nothing to keep.  Author Jessica Kleiman admitted in Forbes magazine, after finding a cache of old letters and notes, “Had those been sent to me via email or text, I definitely would not still have them.”  I’m not casting aspersions on the quality of on-line correspondence in contrast to paper letters.  (I’m not really a Luddite: I use e-mail all the time and I compose on a word processor; I even maintain a blog.  This isn’t about disparaging the existence of electronic media, which has many benefits.)  I’m also not lamenting the loss of the art of writing letters which declined long before computers arrived on the scene.  I’m just contemplating the durability of electronic writing versus the paper kind, how it’ll last and be accessible in the future. 

Libraries keep old books and periodicals we can get to when we want them.  There are archival collections that contain the letters and papers of the Tennessee Williamses, Max Lerners, Jo Mielziners, Cheryl Crawfords, Brooks Atkinsons, S. N. Behrmans, and Elia Kazans (to name just a few with whose papers I’ve worked) and scholars, writers, and historians consult their holdings all the time.  Who keeps electronic publications?  Where would I go in the future to work with the e-mails or e-publications of a current figure I want to write about?  Nancy Reagan kept her husband’s letters (and my mom and dad kept each others’); who’s keeping Barack Obama’s private e-mails?  One of the projects on which I worked was The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams (New Directions, 2000 and 2004).  The two published volumes cover correspondence from 1920 to 1957.  Would an editor or a biographer 80 years from now be able to find e-mails, tweets, blog comments, and so on from today?  Someone saved Williams’s early letters (he was nine in 1920; his grandfather apparently kept some of his letters) and they’re amazingly revealing to look back at!  My parents (and, apparently, my own grandfather, too) kept some of my old letters from high school, college, and the army, but if I ever become famous, would any of my friends and colleagues have retained old e-mails for a researcher to look at? 

Even if they’re not erased, old e-mails or word-processor files will be stored on some obsolete hard drive somewhere, maybe irretrievable even if someone could find it.  Technology obsolesces while paper and ink always remains accessible.  Even if letters are stashed somewhere, someone can find them and read them.  We frequently hear reports of centuries-old documents that have been discovered hidden away.  Back in 2003, members of the First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan who were cleaning out some rooms in the basement of the church stumbled on two sermons exhorting the congregation to support the American Revolution.  The historic sermons were written in 1776 and survived tucked away in the pages of a ledger, easily legible again after 227 years.  If the Rev. John Rodgers, the church's pastor during the late colonial period, had written his sermons on a computer, it’s doubtful they’d have survived 25 years, much less 225!  Will 200-year-old e-mails be available for anyone to reread in 2215?  I wonder.

Some of Williams’s correspondence (and all of Kazan’s)—including postcards, telegrams, and random notes—are in the various archival collections of his correspondents’ papers in libraries and document repositories scattered around the country from New York City to Los Angeles and Cambridge to Key West.  Would e-mails ever end up in those kinds of places where they could be retrieved by writers of the future?  Many e-mail systems don’t even save messages older than a week or so.  They’re just erased, gone, sent out into the ether.  What will happen to the next Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, or Ronald Reagan (whose letters are published in I Love You, Ronnie: The Letters of Ronald Reagan to Nancy Reagan; Random House, 2000)?  Those letters are often fascinating and revealing.  If newspapers are the first drafts of history, then letters may be the notes for that draft.  That kind of thing may not be available for future writers and scholars.  They’ll either be lost altogether or deposited somewhere in a pile of old storage media that no one can read even if someone found them.  I mean, you find an old letter, telegram, or postcard, it doesn’t take any special technology to access it.  (In addition to the old letters of mine to my parents and my grandfather I’ve found, I also recently came across a collection of letters from my father to my mother while they were apart for a month when my dad was abroad before my mother joined him.  My dad also collected and bound the letters he and my mom exchanged during World War II.  And I can just read them!  Who’s keeping the electronic love messages of today’s courting couples, the latter-day Reagans and my folks?)

The same would be true of Tennessee Williams’s journals, selections of which (as well as those of artist David Wojnarowicz) have been published and, like the letters, reveal a great deal about his development as a playwright and how he formed many of this principles and concepts.  (I drew on one entry in Williams’s journals, later released as Notebooks; Yale University Press, 2006, for my essay “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater,” republished on ROT on 9 May 2012.  Wojnarowicz’s journals were published as The Waterfront Journals; Grove Press, 1996.)  I have paper journals that go back to my high school days, including travel diaries from trips to places like the Soviet Union (1965) and China (1980) that I can still read and reminisce over (or use for a blog post, as I did with my travelogue of Istanbul on 24 June 2010).  My friend Kirk Woodward has kept journals for most of his sentient life and has generously let me publish parts of them—or he’s written articles based on selected entries, in some cases along with old letters—on ROT (see, for example, “Kirk Woodward’s King Lear Journal,” 4 June 2010, or “A Year in Korea,” 18 January 2011, among others).  Today those would also be kept on computer.  Whether they’re word-processor files or an on-line blog like this one, they’re subject to disappearing into the ozone one way or another.  All those accounts of early experiences, travels, and ideas would be lost to us—and I can’t be the only one who finds those looks back tremendously fascinating and telling—when all there is is electronic media, as ephemeral and technically precarious as they are, like those old floppies I have that I can’t read anymore! 

Of course, it’s not just e-mails and computer journals that are perishable.  Websites in general are also, despite the myth that nothing ever disappears from the ’Net.  I can’t say that anything I post on ROT is worthy of saving, but let’s imagine that it is.  In 50 years, will anyone be able to find copies of my old posts?  I’ve published a few articles in on-line periodicals which don’t have paper editions.  Will my articles and anyone else’s in those cyber journals still be available for someone doing research in 10 or 20 years?  (Believe it or not, a few of my essays have been cited by later writers—and one on-line essay was even republished, albeit in a bowdlerized version and without my knowledge, as I described in “The Case of the Purloined Paper,” 5 February 2010.)  At least one of my contributions has already disappeared from an on-line journal’s site because the publication changed format.  Even the more prominent Internet writing, in e-journals like Huffington Post, Slate, or Politico: will anyone be able to research old articles on those sites in half a century like I can with old newspapers, Time magazines, or books?  It doesn’t seem as though any of those outlets, whose content includes significant writing and opinions that should bear on future accounts of our time, will be available for study and research.  (I’ve done many research projects, like “The Lost Première of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale,” 20 March  2010, or “The Washington Square Players: Art for Art’s Sake,” 21 and 24 June 2012, which required digging out old reviews.  I quote reviews in my current ROT play reports, and I include the Internet press in my survey.  Will a future researcher be able to find the old on-line reviews for a reconstruction of, say, Charles Mee’s Big Love, which I saw a few weeks ago, or Beth Henley’s Laugh, a world première on which I reported earlier this month?  It’s problematical at best.)

Kirk wrote me, when I broached the inclination to write this rumination, “When I put together my ‘autobiography’ [Kirk’s written an extensive memoir], based on letters and journals, I found that the amount of material for the most recent couple of decades was miniscule compared to that for the previous years.”  (Kirk estimates that less than a quarter of the memoir covers almost 45% of his life—since the mid-’80s, when home computers became common—“illustrating the point about fewer written sources.”)  My interpretation of this remark is that the recent record is lacking because it had all been inscribed electronically and has evaporated.  He also once sent me a copy of a wonderful memoir his grandfather wrote covering his life as a frontier lawyer for the first 60 years of the 20th century.  (Kirk wrote “A Lawyer and a Life” for ROT on 11 November 2010 based on that memoir.)  Today that chronicle would be written on a computer and, unless the author printed a copy on paper, it would exist only as electronic blips on some disk somewhere.  The same is true of the diary of Kirk’s late wife, Pat, which recounted her obsession with the Beatles in 1964—and which Kirk shared with us on ROT on 8 January 2013.  He could do that because it was on paper and he could access it.  I donated my copy of the reminiscence of Kirk’s grandfather to the local history division of the New York Public Library (“Obiter Dicta: Some Experiences During Sixty Years Practice in Kentucky Courts” by Ernest Woodward, call no.: ITY 01-10556) so that someone interested in that bit of Americana can find it.  What would happen to a latter-day counterpart?  (In 2005, I wrote an impromptu memoir of my 2½ years as an army intel officer in Berlin, but I wrote it on my computer.  Will it still be around in a readable form in 20 or 30 years?) 

This is a particularly topical subject at the moment because of the issue of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.  Though most of the coverage of the Clinton brouhaha focuses on the “gotcha” aspect, the desire to use the e-mails to find blame someone can pin on her for, say, Benghazi or some other things her adversaries can tar her with, in fact, one of the stated reasons for archiving official e-mails and electronic communications, just like the paper kind, is for the historical record.  Now and then, you hear someone mention that point in passing in a report of this story.  That, of course, is exactly the same thing as digging through Tennessee Williams’s or Elia Kazan’s letters and notes—historical (in that case, literary/artistic) research.

The issue with Clinton’s potentially missing correspondence, of course, is that it was either deliberately or carelessly discarded/not saved.  That can happen with paper mail as well.  What I’m considering is less conscious—the loss of the whole record of someone’s thoughts, ideas, ruminations, expressions simply because the format, that is, electronic blips on a storage medium, is innately ephemeral and obsolescent.   (As I said, writing on paper never goes out of date—it can be deciphered as long as it exists—barring, of course, everyone forgetting how to read the language, which can happen but takes centuries, not decades.)

There is, of course, another technical vulnerability that effects e-mails and other electronically-generated documents, whether on line or on a word processor: hacking.  Any computer system can be hacked sooner or later.  We mostly know hacking from the leaked documents that have made the news, such as the recent Sony incident and the thefts by U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning (now known as Chelsea), posted on WikiLeaks, and NSA consultant Edward Snowden, but hacking can result in the alteration of electronic records as well, of course.  There are frequent stories of some student who’s hacked a school’s computer system and changed grades, and the same thing can happen to electronic memos and letters.  Paper documents can, of course, be forged or altered, too—the embarrassment at CBS in 2004 when Dan Rather took at face value some memos purporting to show that George W. Bush had gotten special treatment during his Air National Guard service is a prime example.  The memos turned out to have been latter-day forgeries and the exposure discredited not only the 60 Minutes Wednesday report but Rather’s entire career.  But that’s not easy to accomplish or get away with.  Electronic forgery or alteration is much harder to detect and can screw up someone’s research with false information or the deletion of important facts.  E-mails are far more susceptible to this kind of manipulation than paper letters, but I’m focusing here more on the loss of access to a letter-writer’s entire correspondence—or a large chunk of it—due not so much to nefarious acts but the innate realities of electronic writing.

(There’s a sidelight to the issue of e-mail hacking.  To protect against it and maintain security and privacy, some e-mail users employ passwords.  That may safeguard the e-mail but it’d be a bane for a subsequent researcher if the password remains secret after the writer’s death.  You can’t really lock someone out of a paper letter unless you secure the file in a vault.)

Unfortunately, I don’t know the solution to this impending problem.  We can hope that e-mails and other electronic documents will be preserved—and safeguarded—somehow, that some kind of archival system will be devised so that researchers, scholars, and students can retrieve them in the future, and that there will always be some way to read those old e-documents.  But I don’t see any movement to assure that any of that wishful thinking will see realization.  The government may have a system of preserving and archiving official documents created by computers, and perhaps some corporations do, too, for their own uses.  (Among my research projects, not a few have required work on the collected files and papers of such organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation; the New York Shakespeare Festival; New Directions Publishing Corporation; the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center; the Gotham Book Mart; and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.)  Right now, however, it’s just haphazard whether someone saves and stores ordinary old electronic writing, the kind that you and I create—or the next generation’s Tennessee Williams or Elia Kazan—or not.  It’s just dumb luck that they can be located and then accessed again decades hence.  Like Kirk when he was trying to find resources for his autobiography, the next generation of researchers and writers may find the record from the last few decades into the coming ones lacking.  Will we ever see the collected letters of the great 21st-century writers, artists, business leaders, military commanders, politicians?  I fear we won’t—or that the output will be so meager it will amount to a few slim volumes of spotty correspondence.    On the New York Times blog Opinionator, for example, author Mason Currey wrote:

In recent years, a number of journalists and critics have lamented the death of the literary letter.  The publication of Saul Bellow’s letters in 2010 [Saul Bellow: Letters; Viking] and William Styron’s last year [Selected Letters of William Styron; Random House, 2012] were accompanied by waves of speculation about how many more such collections we can expect.  There was also no small amount of hand-wringing about how “The Collected Emails of Dave Eggers” (or whomever) will never cast quite the same spell.

I’ll say one thing for sure: I’m glad I won’t have to be doing the digging for those elusive letters.  It’ll be someone else’s job.  He or she has my condolences—though it’s doubtful anyone will know I felt this way: this message, too, exists only on computers!

Books in Print

Not long ago, I made the possibly shameful confession that I love libraries. I guess it’s not surprising to learn that I love books, too. I also love newspapers, but I not only love the daily paper and its news stories and editorials, but I love the look of it. No, that’s not accurate. I love the looks of the different newspapers. 

I live in New York City now and I read the New York Times and I occasionally look at the Post, Daily News, and Village Voice. I grew up in Washington where my family took both the Washington Post and the Evening Star. When I was a teenager, we lived in Germany and we read the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune and The Stars and Stripes. They all looked different, with different banners, different typefaces, different layouts, even different sizes: The Stars and Stripes, New York Post, Daily News, and Village Voice are tabloids; the others are (or were—the Star is no longer with us and the Paris Trib is now the International Herald Tribune) broadsheets. When I came to New York and got into research, either for graduate school, independent projects, or out-of-town clients, I referred to a lot of newspapers from all over the country and even all over the world and I found a kind of pleasure in seeing the variations on the theme of newspaper format that was both thrilling and comforting at the same time. It was fun, a kind of game like spotting license plates on a long-distance car trip. 

From what I’ve been reading over the past few years, this little corner of civilization is in jeopardy. It’s getting too expensive to publish newspapers and the readership is shrinking. People who get their news from papers are turning to on-line editions and as subscribers and readers migrate to electronic media, advertisers abandon print media, too, and publishers lose their principal source of revenue. Several papers around the country have already closed down and others are abandoning coverage and reducing their sizes. Sooner or later, the act of unfolding a newspaper and thumbing through the day’s stories, ads, and editorials, moving from the front page to the last, from one section to another, will no longer be a common occurrence. Sitting on a subway or in a park with a newspaper won’t be possible anymore. 

It looks like the same future is in store for books, too. E-books are becoming more and more common and, some publishers predict, will soon overtake paper books in terms of sales. Like newspapers, it will eventually become too expensive to publish printed books as readers move to the electronic versions. I will miss books when it comes to that. 

I suppose I have to cop to being something of a Luddite. I got a computer in the mid-1980s, but I didn’t go on line until long after everyone else had done so. I just didn’t see any need for it—until I did, and then I linked up. I still don’t own a CD or DVD player. I got my first cell phone just last winter because until then, I didn’t see the need. (I still rarely use my cell—which, by the way, doesn’t take pictures, play music, or record sounds.) The truth is, I don’t really like reading on a screen. I do it because it’s now a necessity, but if I want to read a long piece from a website, I often print it out and read it on paper. It’s not that I reject technology. I got a wordprocessor during my first semester in a Ph.D. program because I could see the advantages it provided for a writing-heavy course. I gladly gave up my electric typewriter—I’m not one of those curmudgeons who insists on hunting-and-pecking on an old manual because it “feels right.” I don’t see how any writer, teacher, or student can work without a computer (or the Internet) these days. 

But there’s something about a book (and a newspaper) that makes me resist the idea of e-versions. I have a small private library and I can’t imagine living without it. You can’t line bookshelves with e-books. (E-books also don’t have covers that can be little works of art in themselves. Maybe you can’t judge the book by its cover—but an e-book doesn’t have one at all. And can you imagine a coffee-table e-book?) I have books that go back to high school—and I still use them! As useful as the Internet is—and I use it all the time for my work as well as for my amusement—sometimes a book is just the best way to go. 

I also use e-mail, both for private and frivolous correspondence and for work-related communication. For speed and efficiency, you can’t beat it and I find it immensely useful and often entertaining. (I have a friend with whom I exchange daily—often several times a day—messages just chatting about this ‘n’ that—stuff we’ve seen or read, thought up, or heard about.) ROT started from e-mails. But when I was doing a lot of research for some scholars at universities outside New York, digging up references and documents for them, it dawned on me that e-mail is basically ephemeral. I know you can save it, and offices and agencies are required to keep significant messages, but electronic communications are just evanescent. What’s more, they can’t be passed along later on to an archive like a library, and an awful lot of that research I did was finding old letters sent from one historically important figure to another. One project on which I assisted was the publication of The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams. The first two volumes cover correspondence from 1920 to 1957. Would a future editor or biographer be able to find e-mails, tweets, blog comments, and so on from 90 years earlier? Someone saved Williams’s early letters (he was nine in 1920); later correspondence—including postcards, telegrams, and random notes—are in various archival collections in libraries and document repositories around the country. Would e-mails ever end up in those kinds of places where they could be retrieved by writers of the future? My parents have kept some of my old letters from school and the army, but if I ever become famous, would any of my friends and colleagues have retained old e-mails for a researcher to look at? Many e-mail systems don’t even save messages older than a week or so. They’re just erased, gone, sent out into the ether. What will happen to the next Tennessee Williams or Elia Kazan (I helped collect his letters for a scholar, too) or Ronald Reagan (Nancy published his old letters to her)? Those letters are often fascinating and revealing. If newspapers are the first drafts of history, then letters may be the notes for that draft. 

I’m not bemoaning “the lost art of letter writing.” I’ve written and received e-mails that are every bit as eloquent as any paper letters I’ve seen. (And not every letter—or everyone’s letters—has literary aspirations. The art of writing letters declined long before computers arrived on the scene.) What I’m questioning is the staying power of electronic correspondence. Even if it’s not erased, it’ll be stored on some obsolete hard drive somewhere, maybe even irretrievable if someone could find it. Technology becomes obsolete—just ask any library or school that still has Betamax videotapes they can’t watch anymore—while paper and ink will always remain accessible. Even if they’re stashed somewhere, someone can find them and read them. We frequently hear reports of hundred-year-old documents that have been discovered hidden away. Will 100-year-old e-mails be available for anyone to reread? I wonder. 

It’s not just e-mails and such that are in this predicament, of course. Websites in general are ephemeral, too. I can’t attest to the worthiness for preservation of anything I post on ROT, but let’s imagine that it’s worth keeping. In 50 years, will anyone be able to find copies of my old posts? I’ve published a few articles in on-line periodicals which don’t have paper editions. There’s no question about the legitimacy of such publication as a career credit, but will the articles still be accessible for someone doing research in 10 or 20 years? (Believe it or not, a few of my essays have been cited by later writers. But those citations were from printed journals.) Even the more prominent Internet writing, like Slate or Politico: will anyone be able to research old articles on those sites in half a century like I can with old newspapers, Time magazines, or books? It doesn’t feel like any of those outlets, which do contain serious writing and opinions that should have some bearing on histories of our time written in the future, will be available for consultation and research. (I certainly can’t put a copy of the e-journal on my shelf among the small collection of my published essays, can I?) 

I’m not making allusions to the dubious provenance of on-line publications in contrast to paper ones. We all know that there are dangers in using Internet information as a reference. Books and printed periodicals have the cachet of editors and fact-checkers, though we also know from many recent revelations that that isn’t a guarantee of accuracy or even honesty. I’m only contemplating the permanence, the lasting availability, the future accessibility of on-line writing versus the paper kind. Libraries keep old books and periodicals we can get to when we want them. There are archival collections that contain the letters and papers of the Tennessee Williamses, Max Lerners, and Elia Kazans and scholars, writers, and historians consult their holdings all the time. Who keeps electronic publications? Where would I go in the future to work with the e-mails or e-publications of a current figure I want to write about? Nancy Reagan kept her husband’s letters; who’s keeping Barack Obama’s private e-mails? My dad collected and bound the letters he and my mom exchanged during World War II. Who’s keeping today’s courting couples’ electronic love messages? A friend once sent me a copy of a wonderful memoir his grandfather wrote covering his life as a frontier lawyer for the first 60 years of the 20th century. Today that chronicle would be written on a computer and, unless the author printed a copy on paper, it would exist only as electronic blips on some disk somewhere. I donated my copy of the reminiscence to the NYPL so that someone interested in that bit of Americana can find it in the local history division; what would happen to a latter-day counterpart? 

There’s a lot more to my feeling of impending loss when I contemplate the shift from paper books to e-books. On Sunday, 30 May, the New York Times ran two pieces dealing with this very topic, a column by Peter Khoury (“In Ink on a Flyleaf, Forever Yours”) and an editorial by Verlyn Klinkenborg (“Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader”). (Klinkenborg had also published an earlier “Editorial Notebook” essay, “Some Thoughts About E-Reading,” 15 April.) These got me thinking about books, e-books, and why I like the paper kind so much. We all recognize the useful attributes of electronic publications: the portability; the searchability; the immediate access from anywhere, even miles from a bookstore or library, in the middle of the night or a fierce snowstorm. I use Google Books on line and other electronic editions of published materials. I use the on-line editions of not only newspapers from far away, by my own New York Times because it’s sometimes more convenient than the print edition I get at home (such as for cutting-and-pasting quotations or e-mailing short articles to colleagues). But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t miss the paper copy of books and newspapers if they should disappear in favor of the electronic versions. 

Khoury’s main point is that we’d lose the pleasure of finding a book with an inscription on the flyleaf, a personal sentiment from one person to someone else. Khoury called this “the personality that authors—and the people who give books to others as presents—sometimes leave for posterity.” Sometimes, it’s a first-edition inscribed and signed by the author, a sort of visceral connection between us and the creator of the work. You can’t have that in an e-book. “[W]here would the extra personality that comes with an inscription go?” asks Khoury. On my last birthday, one of my cousins gave me a couple of theater-related books. You can’t give an e-book and write a personal note inside the cover so that the sentiment expressed remains part of the book forever. In fact, you can’t really give an e-book to someone else at all—unless you want to give up your e-reader as well, a rather expensive gift in the end. You can’t even lend someone an e-book without giving up the reader as well. I exchange books with friends often, sometimes for long periods. (I have one book now that’s a loan from a friend who gave it to me months ago. I couldn’t keep his e-reader that long.) I used to lend books to students; I wouldn’t do that if I had to give them my expensive reader, too. What a sad loss—no more books as gifts, no more loans, no more personal notes inside. It’s not even about the books. It’s about the human connection, the “collaborative discourse” that we lose. “That is not a good thing for readers, authors, publishers or our culture,” writes Klinkenborg. 

Klinkenborg’s principal theme, in both his editorials, is different. He writes about the feel of a paper book, its physical existence in your possession. “I love the typefaces and the bindings and the feel of well-made paper,” he says. And I couldn’t agree more. Holding a book, owning a book, is something. It’s palpable and warm and somehow alive in a way that holding a little computer screen or sitting in front of a big one just isn’t. Turning pages is a kind of positive act that clicking a button on a screen isn’t. As Klinkenborg observes, “The book is the book, whereas, in electronic formats, the book often seems to be merely the text.” (The same, by the way, is true of a newspaper.) Running my hand down the page of even the cheapest edition of a paperback is somehow satisfying, getting a feel for this object with which I’m about to enter into a relationship. You can’t do that with a computer monitor. 

With many books, I do have a sort of conversation when I read. I make marginal notes, little comments that are a sort of dialogue with the author. I make comparisons to other experiences, references to other books or articles, ideas, thoughts, connections. One example of this is the four sections of my remarks on Kirk Woodward’s The Art of Writing Reviews that I published on ROT in November 2009. The basis of those comments were my marginalia from reading the book; I just typed them up and cleaned up the grammar and syntax for public consumption. One of the books I used to lend to students is my copy of Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting. A few years ago, I had to buy a lending copy because my original one had so many notes and highlights in it, it was unreadable by anyone other than me. (It also started to fall apart from use, like my copy of Harold Clurman’s On Directing, now held together by a rubber band! Those books are not just texts; they’re part of my life.) That kind of symbiosis isn’t possible with an e-book. You can’t make marginal notes on an e-reader or a computer. “Reading is a subtle thing,” says Klinkenborg, “and its subtleties are artifacts of a venerable medium: words printed in ink on paper. Glass and pixels aren’t the same.” 

Klinkenborg also makes a point about the look of a book, the words printed on a page as compared to the pixels on a screen. No wordprocessed or electronic document, no matter the selected font, will ever look as good as a printed book, he insists. Books, he suggests, are beautiful—and, of course, that’s true because bookmaking is an art. E-publishing is a technology. The value of an e-book is what it can do beyond presenting a text to read. As Klinkenborg declares, paper books “do nothing. . . . [W]hat I really love is their inertness.” Like a painting, a sculpture, or an architectural masterpiece, a book’s value isn’t in what it does. It’s in what it is. 

Probably I’m a fuddy-duddy. (Okay, no doubt I am a fuddy-duddy.) I was born long enough ago that books (and newspapers) were just the way I grew up. Paper and printer’s ink were all there was. Hell, photocopiers didn’t even come along until I was in college—and the really useful ones that copied onto plain paper and could handle illustrations and photos didn’t exist until I was in grad school. Klinkenborg makes this same point: I grew up reading books, not texts. “The difference,” as he asserts, “is important.” Those of you who came along later and began sentient life with computers and e-books, and didn’t have the formative introduction to the printed word may see all this as a silly resistance to letting go of obsolescent technology. I don’t have any special attraction to horses and buggies; I grew up with cars and airplanes. I was 14 when the first man went into space. I don’t bemoan the effect TV’s had on movies and theater—I grew up with television. So maybe some of you see electronic publishing and e-books the way I see those other technological advancements. That’s fine; I’m not trying to turn the clock back. I just know I’ll miss the feel of a book in my hand when I read, the way it lies open on my lap or on the desk, how I mark my place with a bookmark. I’ll miss putting my bookplate in the front of a new book. When I finished writing the chapter on Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale for Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance, I went out and found a copy of the 1964 volume that first published both plays together. It was my gift to myself for completing the work. What a perfect reward! (I got that book at the old Gotham Book Mart, but the area near where I live used to be chockablock with used bookstores. I used to love to browse through them once a month or so just to see what treasures I might find.) 

A final thought, borrowed from Verlyn Klinkenborg because he nailed it: “The question isn’t what will books become in a world of electronic reading. The question is what will become of the readers we’ve been—quiet, thoughtful, patient, abstracted—in a world where interactive can be too tempting to ignore.” 

Indeed.