LETTER: In support of libraries with books
April 14, 2023To the Community:
As members of the Vermont Antiquarian Booksellers Association, we have dedicated a portion of our lives to the care of used and rare books. Our shops exist to aggregate good books and to find suitable homes for each. Unsurprisingly, we were horrified to learn of the state university administration’s decision to eliminate physical books from their libraries. Paraphrasing Cicero: “A library without books is like a body without a soul.”
Learning cannot be conflated with the mere acquisition of information. Rather, education – and the books that fill libraries are pathways to opening minds, to developing curiosity and to the extraordinary pleasure of pursuing that curiosity to wherever it leads. Information alone – whatever its format – simply cannot do this.
The digitization of information and the computers and internet which undergird it provides enormous benefits. A university library without access to digital information is unthinkable, but so too is a library without books. This is not an either-or proposition.
Digital information is a great way to get answers to the questions you’ve already asked, but only books can stir the imagination to ask the questions you hadn’t thought of previously. Anyone who has tried to browse books on the internet understands this difference. You may find the book you were looking for easily on the internet, but in a library, it might be sitting next to the one you didn’t know existed, but which changed your life.
To quote British actor, director and writer Stephen Fry: “Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”
John Greenberg
Marlboro
John Greenberg is owner of The Bear Bookshop, an online retailer of rare books, and writes on behalf of the Vermont Antiquarian Booksellers Association.