Breezes from Wonderland

 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editor…

Lane Smith’s “It’s a Book” ends when a monkey, whose patience has been tested by a technophile donkey, uses the term  “Jackass” to describe his benighted companion.  Some parents have objected, and you can read about the controversy on Cape Ann in the Boston Globe.  Lane Smith defends himself with the claim that the book needed a punchline at the end, and he may be right.  I’m usually opposed to the language police, and I was on first reading the article.  Then I remembered “It’s a picture book” and imagined the two and three-year-olds I know gleefully embracing the word and the wild rumpus that ensues.  On second thought, maybe it’s not such a bad way to end a book.

Stuart Shieber uses It’s a Book as a point of departure for discussing the trade-offs between e-books and the printed codex.  You can hear him and Robert Darnton discuss old books and new media in the link below.  Shieber’s presentation begins at about 31:55.
 http://www.youtube.com/user/Harvard#p/u/…

Julia Lam, a former student of mine now working in DC, sent me the link below to a hard-hitting speech by Philip Pullman about the need to keep libraries open.
 http://falseeconomy.org.uk/blog/save-oxf…

I especially liked Pullman’s meditations on the space that opens up between book and reader:

I still remember the first library ticket I ever had. It must have been about 1957. My mother took me to the public library just off Battersea Park Road and enrolled me. I was thrilled. All those books, and I was allowed to borrow whichever I wanted! And I remember some of the first books I borrowed and fell in love with: the Moomin books by Tove Jansson; a French novel for children called A Hundred Million Francs; why did I like that? Why did I read it over and over again, and borrow it many times? I don’t know. But what a gift to give a child, this chance to discover that you can love a book and the characters in it, you can become their friend and share their adventures in your own imagination.

And the secrecy of it! The blessed privacy! No-one else can get in the way, no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what’s going on in that wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You’re a citizen of that great democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that gift?

Somewhere in Blackbird Leys, somewhere in Berinsfield, somewhere in Botley, somewhere in Benson or in Bampton, to name only the communities beginning with B whose libraries are going to be abolished, somewhere in each of them there is a child right now, there are children, just like me at that age in Battersea, children who only need to make that discovery to learn that they too are citizens of the republic of reading. Only the public library can give them that gift.