Atlas Gagged

I was reading skimming the New York Times Book Review today when a full-page advertisement for Bauman Rare Books caught my eye. It seems a first edition of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead is going for $16,000. That’s American money. Special editions of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling, are going for $850 and $1,500 respectively. That says everything you need to know about the state of American intellectual life.

Never mind that, past a certain age, Ayn Rand is for people who are too shallow, avaricious and intellectually stunted to appreciate Ralph Waldo Emerson. Reading Self Reliance alone will give you more cerebral and spiritual nourishment than the collected works of Ayn Rand and the mountains of pseudo-intellectual exegesis that her writing has bred. In fact, I can lay her whole philosophy out for you in three words (uttered by Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street): Greed is good. But even if Ayn Rand’s ideas were worth the paper they were printed on, I would still be offended by the idea that a book could cost $16,000. Or $850, or $1,500. That’s right, Wilco: offended!

I know this is going to shock my bibliophile friends, but I have very little interest in first editions, signed copies, or books with the author’s notes scribbled in the margin. I. Just. Don’t. Care. I’m not terribly concerned about cracking the spines of my own books, or getting pages smudged. When I lived in Portland I bought a two-volume set of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson at Powell’s Books for $12.50. They’re a battered 1929 edition with green cardboard covers, and I’m not especially gentle with them. I take them to the beach and on the subway, and there’s a page in the essay Experience that has a minute blood stain from a bitten hangnail. I love those books, but not because I’m going to retire on them. I’m much more careful with my friends’ books, as I hope and will attest—I had a co-worker who I consider a dear friend, but I would not lend her books because she had a habit of returning them looking as though they’d passed through her dog. But if I borrow a friend’s car, camera, wife, or saucepan, I would feel the same obligation to return them with as little wear and tear as possible.

I have a few books, it’s true, to which I have a sentimental attachment because they were given to me by friends and loved ones, including a ratty, dog-eared copy of The Private Life of the Rabbit, given to me and suitably inscribed by . The book, a trade paperback with many loose pages, isn’t a first edition, nor is it signed by the author. It’s probably worth more than the $2.95 it sold for in 1975, but not much more (it’s out of print, and the hardcover is selling used for about $15). But for the most part the books themselves are interchangeable; I’d just as soon have a worn paperback of Carry On, Jeeves that I can read on the subway, rather than a mint first edition that I’d have to wear white cotton gloves to handle.

The thing that matters to me about books are the ideas they transmit, and those ideas are indestructible (even Ayn Rand’s). Aside from books that are valuable as historical artifacts (a Gutenberg Bible, for example), I think the solicitousness people show for first editions and the like is a fetish: it conflates the medium with the message; the form with the function; the surface with the substance. Reverence for actual books is a good thing inasmuch as it reflects the value we place on literature and ideas, and because someone who has a reverence for books is more likely to keep them in readable condition. But past a certain point, bibliophilia is like only dating women who wear black leather catsuits: you begin to wonder if the contents aren’t in some way irrelevant.

In the last decade there’s been an explosion of literature available online, including the incredibly rich collection of public domain works “published” by Project Gutenberg. Aside from making literature more accessible, electronic publishing has changed what it means to be a book. I hope in my lifetime electronic books will evolve past the hard-to-read PDA versions now extant, but make no mistake, the Internet is well on its way to realizing the science-fictional futures in which the sum of human knowledge is available at the stroke of a few keys (notwithstanding Isaac Asimov’s famous essay, “The Ancient and the Ultimate,” in which he describes a futuristic, self-contained, portable, reading device that turns out to be the old-fashioned book). And as the technology improves and declines in price, it will be harder and harder for reactionary mullahs here and abroad to ban works that offend their delicate sensibilities.

It would probably tickle the arch-capitalist Ayn Rand that one of her books is selling for $16,000. In her universe, money is the measure of all things. She comes to the intellectual fray a century late and a hogshead short. Emerson, ever her better, anticipated her small-minded pursuit of self-gratification at others’ expense:

The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself from enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate it. The exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut out others. Treat men as pawns and ninepins, and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own. The senses would make things of all persons; of women, of children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb, “I will get it from his purse or get it from his skin,” is sound philosophy.

Compensation, Ralph Waldo Emerson