Page 35 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

be accessible by a device that will serve as a comfortable vade mecum for an individual user.”14 By requiring the book to be at minimum “transportable,” Kilgour seems to have excluded such writings as stone inscriptions, though stone inscriptions are certainly a durable means of communication. Fur- thermore, transportable is relative; even a heavy stone inscription would be transportable by the right equipment. By focusing on the book as “artifact” Kilgour acknowledged that electronic books would be future developments, referring to the then-current inconvenience of reading an electronic text on a desktop computer screen. As many of us recall, in the early years of per- sonal computing, before the development of high-speed wireless Internet connections and truly user-friendly hand-held reading devices, the question always raised against electronic books was “Who would want to curl up with a cumbersome computer or laptop when you could curl up with a “real”, i.e. ‘physical’ book?” Or, this question would be turned into a joke by asking, “Who would want to curl up with a computer when you could curl up with a book, or at least with someone who had read a book?”
Stripping away non-essentials, I believe that we may characterize a book as a container for text and related information, designed for storage, distri- bution and communication. Of course, the communication usually occurs by the process of reading, and reading may be the process of viewing images as well as text, or images themselves may be considered text, and sometimes what might appear to be text could be very small drawings.
In a discussion of Timothy Ely’s mystical unique manuscript books in is- sue 9.1 of Fine Books & Collections magazine (Winter 2011), Nicholas Basbanes quoted Ely relative to the difficulty that a graduate student was having in an attempt to decipher Ely’s “language”: “He finally summoned up the courage to ask me if I would tell him what this stuff meant. I told him that for the most part he was to look at these things as if they are tiny drawings, and he just found that to be absolutely unacceptable. It was really frustrating for him, because he just wanted me to give him the code, and I said, there isn’t one” (p. 9).
14 Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book (1998), p. 3. 35