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Episode image is a detail of a photograph taken by Charles Adrian.
Venus visible in the evening sky from Charles Adrian’s rooftop.
Wearing a stylish pair of dungaree shorts on a sunny Spring-like Saturday afternoon, Charles Adrian reflects digressively and at length on some of his reasons for starting the podcast in the first place, as well as indulging in some Vladimir Nabokov.
Pedants corner: Oxford, being in possession of a cathedral, is, of course, a city rather than a town. You can read more about the city of Oxford on Wikipedia here.
Correction: Much of what Charles Adrian says about Vladimir Nabokov and his family in this episode is not quite right. You can read more (and more accurately, one assumes) about Vladimir Nabokov’s life and ancestry on Wikipedia here.
Other books by Vladimir Nabokov discussed on the podcast are Lolita (Page One 71) and Pale Fire (Page One 119, Page One 151 – and particularly the unedited version of that episode – and Page One 189).
Books discussed here were previously discussed in Page One 23, Page One 25, Page One 26 and Page One 43.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 4th April, 2020.
Episode released: 26th May, 2020.
Book listing:
Books As History by David Pearson (Page One 25)
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers (Page One 23)
An Affair Of Honor (trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with Vladimir Nabokov) and The Aurelian (trans. Peter Pertzov in collaboration with Vladimir Nabokov) from Collected Stories by Vladimir Nabokov (Page One 25)
Cosmos by Carl Sagan (Page One 26 and Page One 43)
Links:
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 162nd Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 6th Page One In Review.
I'm recording this on the 4th of April, 2020, a Saturday - a warm, spring-like, sun-filled Saturday here in West London. I've just been for my statutory daily exercise. Um, yeah. I'm wearing my shorts today for the first time this year. I mean, I say shorts. It's... It... They're dungarees but they are also shorts. They're not... You know, they don't have long legs, if that makes sense. I love... I love these. They... yeah, they came from ASOS, if anyone's looking for a pair, and I very much recommend them. I feel very trendy when I'm wearing them, which is probably not true. I don't know. But the important thing is how it makes me feel.
Right. Today... This might be a longer episode than normal because I have quite a lot to say about the second book that I'm going to talk about. But let's get the first book done first. [indistinct] That makes sense, doesn't it? Um...
[page turning]
This... So this was given to me by Michael Caines, who was my guest on the 25th Page One, which we recorded in Hackney at the Wilton Way Cafe. He gave me a book that I think he'd been sent to review himself. I don't know what he wrote about it - if he did. I only know that it was sent to him to rev... Well, he might have told me that but I've forgotten most of what we actually talked about. But inside the book is still a letter to to Michael Caines care of the Times Literary Supplement, dated the 9th of June, 2011. So a good year and a half before he and I sat down to talk. So... I mean, he'd had plenty of time to review it. It's not as if he'd, you know... he was in any rush before giving the book away. But it's just a little letter explaining that he's being sent the book for “consideration for review in your publication, as I believe it will be of great interest to your readers.” Yeah. I'm always coming across things that I should really have looked up before I started recording - I should really have looked up to see whether or not Michael Caines did review this and what he said about it.
I really enjoyed this book. Sorry! It's called Books As History. I didn't tell you that, did I? It's by David Pearson. And the thing that I think I loved most about this book is the discussion of... of the importance that books have as objects, not just for what they contain but for what... you know, for what they are when you hold them in your hands as objects.
It's a very... uh... With apologies to the designers, I think it's a very ugly book. The cover... it just has too much on it. It's shiny, which I don't... I'm not a big fan of anyway - it's laminated. I mean, I suppose that makes it a good coffee table book - you can put your cup down on it and then wipe off any stains that might be left. And they're... I mean, the... the illustrations on the front are wonderful, all of them but there are are ju... Yeah, they were just, as I say, too many of them. In any case, it's also... it's quite a big book - the format of it. I mean, it really is... it's a coffee table book. It's to sit on your coffee table. And it's full of illustrations and so the size of it, I think, improves the quality of the experience in that sense. But not in the sen... you know, it's not a book that you can very easily put in a bag or read on the train, which is my habit. It also discusses...
Did I ever say what it was that I particularly loved about this? I don't know if I did. I... My mind is still outside in the sunshine. One of the things that I... Yes, I talked about the importance of books as objects, didn't I? There's also an interesting reflection on the future of books and, as books become eBooks, whether or not they will be readable in the future and the challenge that that... that sets for libraries, you know, storing... You know, you not only have to store the book itself, you have to store some kind of technology which will allow people in the future to read the book and then how do you keep that technology working.
That's... I think that's a really interesting problem because for thousands of years things that have been written down have been accessible to whoever can understand the language that they're written in. You know, whether or not that's a chunk of stone or a clay tablet or a piece of papyrus, the... the technology of the object is still accessible to us. We can still pick up a papyrus and... and look at it with our eyes, assuming that we can see - or find somebody who can see to translate it for us. And that... You know, that's... that may not forever be the case. Or, alternatively, that may be the reason that books as objects - as objects as we know them, or similar to the way we know them - survive into the future. So all those are questions that I find fascinating. I don't have, obviously, any answers.
The part I want to read from this, though, is about marginalia. And this touches on one of the things that I love about second hand books. I do... I love it when people annotate their books and it's partly for the reasons that are mentioned here but it's partly just as evidence that somebody else has handled and read the book that I am now handling and reading. I find that just a beautiful idea apart from anything else. I find it very comforting.
Later on, I'm going to read from - a bit of a spoiler for the end of the episode - I'm going to read from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, a section of that book in which he talks about the number of books that there are in the world. And I think... So this - the number of books in the world combined with the pleasure of reading a book that somebody else has already read - there... those are the two things that really... they're the wellspring of this podcast, as it were. The reason that I wanted to do a podcast which was originally about second hand books was because, partly I'm anxious about the number of books that exist in the world that I will never read and it makes me a little calmer to know that somebody else has read them, and also I feel a very particular thrill in picking up a book that I know that somebody else has read - the idea that I am having an experience which is in some way parallel to an experience that a previous person, who I may never meet, has had before me. And, obviously, our experiences will be different because we are different people but there may be something linking us through those... the words on the page entering our brains. Yeah. That's... I don't know whether any of you listening will share that but that's certainly... that's... that's the thing that... I'm...
You know, I'm not a... I'm not... It's not that I'm a collector, I'm not a second hand book fanatic, I don't comb book shops and book stalls looking for books - partly, as I say, because I feel so anxious about unread books and the more books I have, the more books I have to read and so on - but that pleasure is definitely there. And so, for me, this... the Second Hand Book Factory episodes of the podcast fulfill the same function: I invite a guest on to the podcast, I give them a book, they give me a book, and I get to read a book that they have also read. And in the... you know, in the best case, obviously, they have read the actual book that they give me. Sometimes, for all kinds of reasons, my guest will have bought a new copy of the book that they give to me and that's... that second best - because, obviously, I'm not holding the actual object that they held - but it's still... it's still wonderful because I am still reading the words that they... that they read.
I don't feel like I'm as articulate as I would like to be explaining all of that but I hope that that gives you a sense of why it is that I've been doing this podcast for the last eight years. I mean, obviously, there's... you know, nothing is ever entirely straightforward. I do it partly as something to do, I do it partly because I enjoy talking to people but the... the... as I say, the wellspring, the thing that really started me off is just a... is a love of books that is... is about the object and the connection that it gives us, potentially, to other people.
So let me now read - I think, probably, David Pearson puts what he says better than I have put what I wanted to say - but this is from page 101. Well, it starts on page 101 of this book and then, because there are lots and lots of illustrations - you know, page-full illustrations - I'm going to read page 101, page 110 and 11, and then from the very beginning of page 114. It's... It's not as much text as that would make it sound. This is A British Library & Oak Knoll Press edition of the book. It's 208 pages so this is somewhere almost in the middle. No… it is! It straddles the middle of the book, doesn't it? There you go. A little bit of basic mathematics. So, yes. This is a little section in which he's talking about the reason that people value books which have... which come with marginalia - in other words, people have written in the margins of the books and around the pages.
If a previous owner is someone famous, we may succumb to a buzz of association of the kind explored more fully below (see p. 132); ...
I'm not going to be doing that but if you find the book yourself, you can obviously refer to page 132 for the more fully... [laughing] the more full... the fuller explanation - or explor... exploration, I should say. [clears throat]
… here we hold in our hand something that was once held by Milton, or Byron, or any personal hero or villain who once owned books. There is often value beyond the merely associational, though, for reasons already stated: books offer a window onto intellectual influences and developing thought processes. We know what William Blake thought about Sir Joshua Reynolds from the inscription he added to the titlepage of a copy of Reynolds's Works: ‘This man was hired to depress art’. Henry VIII's books, a number of which survive in the British Library, are interesting not only because they were once handled by the man himself, but...
And then, flicking through several pages with... I don't know what... I mean, there's a... there's a two-page spread here with... I wonder what book that is, but just surrounded by notes - in the margins but also between the lines and any space there can be... Let's see if there's any clue as to what that might be…
OVERLEAF
Francis Hargrave's habit of copious annotation is well illustrated in this example from his collection, where he fills the margins of a pamphlet on the history of the Temple Church in London.
There we go. So there's that, and then the Nuremberg Chronicle, a Bible with lots of annotation in, and a copy of Montaigne's Essais with underlinings... I wonder... I have a copy of Montaigne's Essais. It would be perhaps interesting to compare whether we underlined the same things on page... 1016 and 1017. It's obviously a different edition from mine.
Anyway. Sorry. I'm... This is going to... This episode is becoming ever longer. Sorry. So:
Henry VIII's books, a number of which survive in the British Library, are interesting not only because they were once handled by the man himself, but also because he marked passages which caught his eye for political or moral purposes. Students of Reformation history also value the books from the personal library of Henry's Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, partly because collectively they provide an insight into what he read, but also because his marginal notes capture his thoughts and responses on particular ideas.
Scholars have long valued the marginalia of earlier experts. When the books of Anthony Askew, a celebrated eighteenth-century collector, were auctioned in 1770 [sic], the catalogue made special reference to the many books which had been annotated by distinguished classicists. The tradition continues to this day: when A. L. Rowse's books were dispersed after his death in 1997, the bookseller's catalogue noted, as a selling point, that ‘the habit of commenting was one that grew with age and wisdom, and, increasingly, the margins and endpapers became ornamented with his judgments: witty, pithy, at a time severe’. People do not need to be famous or important for their marginalia to be of interest; the notes of obscure or anonymous former readers can provide equally valuable testimony of the ways in which books were being absorbed or reacted to in the past.
So there you go. As I say, I'm interested in more than just the testimony itself, but I... yeah, that is definitely something that I can see adds value to a book. Of course, it only adds value, I suppose, in many people's eyes if the things that have been written are of interest... of... you know, are of... are wise and witty and pithy but, yeah, as I say, I don't make that distinction.
[page turning]
Right. [laughing] Sorry. I don't feel like I have a handle on what I'm saying at all today but I shall make an effort to pull myself together.
I'm... I'm going a little bit off-piste now because Michael gave me two books. He was one of the people who gave me two books.
Now, I also want to say, as a little digression, that in the previous Page One In Review, the 5th Page One In Review, I forgot to say that Jessie Greengrass also gave me two books. She gave me the two books that she read from. She gave me Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban but she also gave me Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers - because I hadn't read it and because I've read or listened to a lot of Dorothy L. Sayers' books, and dramatisations of those books, and I hadn't read Gaudy Night and I hadn't been able to catch a dramatisation of it. There... It does exist but it wasn't, for some reason, being played regularly on Radio 4 Extra, which I used to listen to a lot in those days. I have since heard the adaptation but I loved reading that. And I would have read from it in the previous episode if I still had it but I must have given it away to somebody. Which strikes me now as incredibly generous.
I can't believe I parted with that book. It was a beautiful edition, it was wonderful because Jessie had read it and enjoyed it, and it's also... it's a... it's a really great book. It's a... I love Dorothy L. Sayers, I love her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, and I love Harriet Vane. And this book... Gaudy Night focuses on Harriet Vane and is also set in Oxford, which is a town that I have a huge amount of affection for. So, for all those reasons, I am amazed now that I gave it to somebody else. And who knows who I gave it to? I mean, it can't have been a lend because it hasn't come back. Even as I say that, I know that that's not true. It probably was a lend - people never give books back, do they? But I can't ask for it back because I don't know who has it.
But all that to say - so digression over - Michael Caines also gave me two books.
We... This wa... So he... I can't remember what the first book that he talks about in the episode was - again, this is something that I could very easily have looked up and haven't... whatever the book that he liked was, is... has gone out of my memory - but he brought two possible books for me and gave them both to me. So he talked about Books As History by David Pearson, as I say, but he also gave me a collection of Vladimir Nabokov short stories published by Penguin Modern Classics. It's about the size of a paperback Bible, if that makes any sense to you, or a sm... I suppose a, kind of... a shelf edition dictionary, perhaps - you know, a dictionary published to go on the shelf rather than a pocket dictionary - or a guidebook.. Actually, yes, that... It's very much the size of a... you know, a Lonely Planet or a Rough Guide to somewhere like China, which would have a lot [laughing] to say about it. You know, rather than, you know, somewhere like Luxembourg, for example. Nothing wrong with Luxembourg - I've been there, I enjoyed it - but there's just probably more to say about China. That's all I mean by that.
I love this collection and I think it... yeah, I think it's worth talking about at this point even though it wasn't introduced in the episode itself. I... I've read Lolita by Nabokov and I've read Pale Fire, both of which I talked about in episodes of the podcast - you can go to pageonepodcast.com and look under books... in the books menu to find out which episodes those books are discussed as part of - but I hadn't read any other of his writing. That doesn't feel like a very representative sample. This is a fascinating sample of his writing.
All of these stories, I think, were written before Nabokov moved to the United States. So he was living in Berlin for a long time and then I think... No... Or... hmm... I don't remember now. I should know this... Because his family was... was very important before the revolution. I think his father was something like finance minister at one point and so they lived in a very hu... you know, a huge house - you can... you can Google Nabokov's house in St. Petersburg - and also had a country estate. You know, he really was... they were... they were landed gentry. I don't think they were nobles but they were certainly landed gentry And then, come the revolution, or a little bit before they escaped Russia and, I think, moved to Berlin. He went to Cambridge, I think - so he came to the United Kingdom for a while - but did live in Berlin for quite a while, then moved to Paris and then the United States. A lot of these stories are set either in Russia pre-revolution - so a kind of remembered or imagined [laughing] rural idyll really - or a slightly depressed Berlin of Russian emigrés, often without very much money and a little bit hopeless. And then there are... there are also stories set in Paris.
My favourite story of these is called An Affair Of Honor. It's, sort of, about a third of the way through this collection. I'm not going to read very much from it because I really... I would like to read all of it but this episode of the podcast is already going to be extra long, as I say, and if I read the story, I think just the reading of the story itself would take an hour. I ju... It's a very funny story and it's beautifully written. It's about a man called Anton Petrovich - I mean, I really recommend that you go and look this story up if you can. He's a... So he's a Russian emigré living in Berlin. He's doing quite well. He has friends who are not doing quite so well in Berlin. In a... you know, financially, I mean. He's married, and he and his wife have this friend called Berg [/bɜːrg/] - or Berg [/berg/] , I suppose - who is just more attractive and better at everything than Anton is, and Anton discovers that Berg and his wife are sleeping together, and he rather foolishly challenges Berg to a duel. Berg, we find out very early on in the story, is an expert... shooter, I was going to... he's very good with a gun - expert marksman - and killed lots of people during the revolution. Here we are... in fact, on the second page of the story, it says:
He once showed Anton Petrovich a little old black notebook. The pages were all covered with crosses, exactly five hundred and twenty-three in number. ‘Civil war in the Crimea - a souvenir,’ said Berg with a slight smile, and coolly added, ‘Of course, I counted only those Reds I killed outright.’
So Anton Petrovich is... he's thrown his glove at Berg because he discovers him in his wife's bedroom - well, in the bedroom that he and Anton... that Anton and his wife share. So he throws his glove at Berg rather... he... [laughing] I mean, he can't even aim his glove right. His glove... I think it hits the wall and lands in the washbasin. And then he goes to see his... some friends of his, who are drunk - and they're just rather disreputable anyway and not particularly the kind of people you'd want handling your affairs - and... and impulsively asks them to be his seconds. And he says to them:
‘Tomorrow you two will call on him,’ said Anton Petrovich. ‘Select the spot, and so on. He did not leave me his card. According to the rules he should have given me his card. I threw my glove at him.’
’You are acting like a noble and courageous man,’ said Gnushke with growing animation. ‘By a strange coincidence, I am not unfamiliar with these matters. A cousin of mine was also killed in a duel.’
Why ‘also’? Anton Petrovich wondered in anguish.
So, yeah, I find that [laughing] very funny. And then the rest of the story is him leading up to the duel and then... I won't spoil it. I won't tell you what happens but it is... I think it's beautiful and it ends just gorgeously. So: [laughing] go and find it, read it.
What I wanted to read from... I wanted to read two little bits from a story called The Aurelian - and this is also rather a sad story. Again... I was going to say another emigré but I... I'm not entirely sure if he is. He's called Pilgram which is... it sounds more German so perhaps this is just about a German man. He owns a shop that... He sells butterflies that people have netted and killed and... and put in cases and, in a sense, he is also a butterfly, trapped in a case: he's never been anywhere in his life. He dreams of going to exotic places. In this paragraph, for example, from page 287:
In these impossible dreams of his he visited the Islands of the Blessed, where in the hot ravines that cut the lower slopes of the chestnut-and-laurel-clad mountains there occurs a weird local race of the cabbage white; and also that other island, those railway banks near Vizzavona and the pine woods further up, which are the haunts of the squat and dusky Corsican swallowtail. He visited the far North, the arctic bogs that produced such delicate downy butterflies. He knew the high alpine pastures, with those flat stones lying here and there among the slippery matted grass; for there is no greater delight than to lift such a stone and find beneath it a plump sleepy moth of a still undescribed species. He saw glazed Apollo butterflies, ocellated with red, float in the mountain draft across the mule track that ran between a steep cliff and an abyss of wild white waters. In Italian gardens in the summer dusk, the gravel crunched invitingly underfoot, and Pilgram gazed through the growing darkness at clusters of blossoms in front of which suddenly there appeared an oleander hawk, which passed from flower to flower, humming intently and stopping at the corolla, its wings vibrating so rapidly that nothing but a ghostly nimbus was visible about its streamlined body. And best of all, perhaps, were the white heathered hills near Madrid, the valleys of Andelusia, fertile and wooded Albarracin, whither a little bus driven by the forest guard's brother groaned up a twisted road.
I love it. I mean this... In the end... I will spoil this story a little bit because, in the end, he's just about to go... I think he sells his most valuable butterflies and makes enough money that he can finally go on one of these trips. And, as he's preparing to go, he has a stroke or a heart attack and... and just di... he dies. He doesn't even get to leave the shop. And Nabokov's stories are full of these really very sad characters who either... you know, they're awkward or they're not able to do things or they don't know how or they just... they don't have the opportunity or their horizons are too small, and he... he pokes fun at them but I think he also... there's a... there is... there... I don't know. I was going to say there is... he has a love for them as well. He invests them with beauty. And I think that paragraph about the butterflies is a good example of that. He... He takes this man's dream seriously. I think he gives us something of the beauty of that dream - the dream to go and find these these extraordinary butterflies.
So I wanted to read you that and I also wanted to read you the opening of the story because I love the way that he brings Berlin to life in this story. So this is, presum... He's talking about Berlin in the twenties, I suppose. So we're talking about the Weimar Republic. It's, you know, a time of economic depression but, you know, liberal government, the... the rise of something more sinister. But there is also something, even in this description, which is still... you can still find in today's Berlin, I think.
So this is The Aurelian. It's on page 280 of this, as I say, Penguin Modern Classics edition of the... of the stories. The... The... There are... oh, there are notes in the back so, including the notes, there are 784 pages in this edition. It's quite... It's, again, quite a heavy book. It's not one that you can easily slip in a bag and take on the tube with you. So... Which partly explains why it's taken me... I mean, I've been reading this since Michael gave it to me, so I've been reading it for the last seven years, story by story - with, you know, gaps where I didn't pick it up, but... Anyway. Sorry.
I
Luring aside one of the trolley-car numbers, the street started at the corner of a crowded avenue. For a long time it crept on in obscurity, with no shopwindows or any such joys. Then came a small square (four benches, a bed of pansies) round which the trolley steered with rasping disapproval. Here the street changed its name, and a new life began. Along the right side, shops appeared: a fruiterer's, with vivid pyramids of oranges; a tobacconist's, with the picture of a voluptuous Turk; a delicatessen, with fat brown and gray coils of sausages; and then, all of a sudden, a butterfly store. At night, and especially when it was damp, with the asphalt shining like the back of a seal, passersby would stop for a second before that symbol of fair weather. The insects on exhibit were huge and gorgeous. People would say to themselves, ‘What colors - amazing!’ and plod on through the drizzle. Eyed wings wide-open in wonder, shimmering blue satin, black magic - these lingered for a while floating in one's vision, until one boarded the trolley or bought a newspaper. And, just because they were together with the butterflies, a few other objects would remain in one's memory: a globe, pencils, and a monkey's skull on a pile of copybooks.
As the street blinked and ran on, there followed again a succession of ordinary shops - soap, coal, bread - with another pause at the corner where there was a small bar. The bartender, a dashing fellow in a starched collar and green sweater, was deft at shaving off with one stroke the foam topping the glass under the beer tap; he also had a well-earned reputation as a wit. Every night, at a round table by the window, the fruiterer, the baker, an unemployed man, and the bartender's first cousin played cards with great gusto. As the winner of the current stake immediately ordered four drinks, none of the players could ever get rich.
On Saturdays, at an adjacent table, there would sit a flabby, elderly man with a florid face, lank hair, and a grayish mustache, carelessly clipped. When he appeared, the players greeted him noisily without looking up from their cards. He invariably ordered rum, filled his pipe, and gazed at the game with pink-rimmed watery eyes. The left eyelid drooped slightly.
There you go. So that's your introduction to Pilgram and his butterfly store.
[page turning]
Okay. The third book, finally. The third book that I want to talk about in today's episode is Cosmos by Carl Sagan. This was given to me by Gary Mary in the 26th Page One. I'd heard of this book and I'd heard of the series that it accompanies - the television series - and I hadn't either watched the television series or read the book so this was an excellent choice. It was an excellent choice not just because I hadn't read it, but also because I knew that I was going to like it.
I'm very, very interested in science and I'm interested in cosmology. I've... Uh, just space and planets and stars and galaxies and the distances between them - all those things just fascinate me. The... Just the size of the numbers that are involved I find so exciting. I still, today... I sometimes go and stand... I have a roof terrace and I go and stand on the roof terrace and just look at the stars - the ones that I can see. I'm living in London so there aren't that many stars but, this time of year, you can still see Orion's Belt, for example, and Venus is in the sky at the moment. And I don't know the figures but, you know, to think of the distance between us and Venus, and then the distance between Venus and any of the other stars that I can see... I just... I love... I love it. I love it. That's so incredible. We live in such an amazing universe. I don't know... ‘amazing’ might be too weak a word to use but there we are. That's the one I'm using.
And I did... I really enjoyed this book. I... So I knew that I was going to and, in fact, I did. What came as a surprise was this little section... so, quite near the end of the book - it's on page... it starts on page 307 of... page.... so, including the appendixes but excluding all the further reading and indexes, 382 pages this book has, so this is quite near the end. It's a... Abacus Science Greats edition of Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Right, let me just read
When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented brains. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library.
A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called ‘leaves’) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it, and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding people together, citizens of different epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.
Some of the earliest authors wrote on clay. Cuneiform writing, the remote ancestor of the Western alphabet, was invented in the Near East about 5,000 years ago. Its purpose was to keep records: the purchase of grain, the sale of land, the triumphs of the king, the statutes of the priests, the positions of the stars, the prayers to the gods. For thousands of years, writing was chiseled into clay and stone, scratched onto wax or bark or leather; painted on bamboo or papyrus or silk - but always one copy at a time and, except for the inscriptions on monuments, always for a tiny readership. Then in China between the second and sixth centuries, paper, ink and printing with carved wooden blocks were all invented, permitting many copies of a work to be made and distributed. It took a thousand years for the idea to catch on in remote and backward Europe. Then, suddenly, books were being printed all over the world. Just before the invention of movable type, around 1450, there were no more than a few tens of thousands of books in all of Europe, all handwritten; about as many as in China in 100 B.C., and a tenth as many as in the Great Library of Alexandria. Fifty years later, around 1500, there were ten million printed books. Learning had become available to anyone who could read. Magic was everywhere.
More recently, books, especially paperbacks, have been printed in massive and inexpensive editions. For the price of a modest meal you can ponder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the origin of species, the interpretation of dreams, the nature of things. Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.
The great libraries of the world contain millions of volumes, the equivalent of about 10ˆ14 [ie 10 to the power 14] bits of information in words, and perhaps 10ˆ15 [ie 10 to the power 15] bits in pictures. This is ten thousand times more information than in our genes, and about ten times more than in our brains. If I finish a book a week...
And this is... Sorry to break in here, but this is a sentence that resonated with me very, very strongly, and with my anxiety about unread books:
If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read. The information in books is not preprogrammed at birth but constantly changed, amended by events, adapted to the world. It is now twenty-three centuries since the founding of the Alexandrian Library. If there were no books, no written records, think how prodigious a time twenty-three centuries would be. With four generations per century, twenty-three centuries occupies almost a hundred generations of human beings. If information could be passed on merely by word of mouth, how little we should know of our past, how slow would be our progress! Everything would depend on what ancient findings we had accidentally been told about, and how accurate the account was. Past information might be recovered, but in successive retellings it would become progressively more muddled and eventually lost. Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.
So that touches on several things that I... Obviously, I think libraries are immensely important - and public libraries were formative places for me. But it also touches on why books are so magical as vectors of knowledge, [laughing] if I can put it like that... containers of knowledge, perhaps, is better. And... and then, also, that... that little sentence or two about how few books any of us will ever get to read in... you know, in comparison... you know, when one compares it to the number of books that exist in the world. I can't bear that.
And so that's one of the reasons that... as I say, that Page One exists. And it's the reason why I just read the first page. I didn't read all of the second hand books that I introduced on the podcast - I never did get round to reading them all - but I am comforted by the fact that somebody else has already read those books and that knowledge is somehow in the world. And I suppose I... I liked to think that, by reading the first page, we do get a taste of what's inside and perhaps we can... we can dream the rest to ourselves. It's not quite the same thing - and the... yes, the handing of knowledge doesn't happen in quite the same way - but there is... there is some transmission, I think, that happens by doing that and I hope that this podcast contributes in some very small way.
In any case, thank you very much for listening to all of that. This has been a mammoth episode - and... and a very digressive episode - but, yes, it has been, nevertheless, the 6th Page One In Review. I've been Charles Adrian. You have all been very generous with your time. Thank you very much for listening. Until next time, bye.
Jingle
Thank you for listening to Page One. For more information about the podcast, please go to pageonepodcast.com.
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]