Old Books
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of news of disruption and provocation. Some people have minimized the actual consequences that might come out of all this and others have fallen into panic and desperation. I think that we will gain some degree of clarity about how we should be feeling about the prospects for our country over the next couple of months. Either our democratic institutions will hold or they won’t. If they fail we will see what the conditions are under an American autocracy.
One lesson that we learned from the Holocaust (and from Putin’s Russia) is that there is a time to leave when it is no longer safe to remain in a country as a Jew. In the years leading up to the Holocaust, there were many Jewish leaders who remained in places that were becoming more dangerous because they felt that they had a responsibility to their community. I feel that responsibility, but I also feel a responsibility to monitor the situation and to encourage no one to remain past the point of no return.
As you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Jewish future this last year. My recent reading in pursuit of the idea of Jewish Futurism has focused around the early modern Zionist theorists. My latest subject has been Asher Ginzberg, better known by his pen name, Ahad Ha-Am. Ginzberg’s Zionism is utopian. He strongly opposed the Political Zionism of Theodor Herzl. In many ways, he was less practically minded than Herzl, but in the end, the working end of the Zionist movement became more a product of Ahad Ha-Am’s thinking than that of Herzl. I will be writing about Ahad Ha-Am in future weeks.
For now, I just want to offer a quote from him (in a translation from the Hebrew by Leon Simon) that matches our moment, to my mind at least: “The Jewish people has never lived in the present. Always unhappy, always in bitter revolt against the wickedness of the world as it is, we have none the less retained undying hope and faith in the triumph of the good and the right in the world that is to be… Whether the Jew is fundamentally an optimist or a pessimist is a much debated question; but it is pointless. The Jew is both an optimist and a pessimist; but his pessimism relates to the present, and his optimism to the future.”
For most of my life I have been in the used and rare book trade. Selling new books is like selling new cars. The choices are limited and the offering is relatively clear. I am not proud to compare selling used books to selling used cars, but that is where the metaphor has driven me. There are far more choices in the world of used cars. Many more models from many different years offered in vastly varied states of repair and function, but sold as is rather than as one dictates to the seller. Most cars are sold to satisfy the practical needs of the customers, but some are special because of the age or rarity or glamour. As a bookseller I have leaned towards the practical, but many of my notions of the practical could have been towards something else or something more.
The book buyer is like the Jew in Ahad Ha-Am’s quote above. The books that they have are not the best that they could have. The best is out there and if they look hard enough and are discerning enough, they will find the book that solves that problem, fills that need, or scratches that itch.
Some booksellers begin with the customer and search for the books that they hope will fill the customer’s needs. There are times when I have tried to be that bookseller, but more often I have been the other kind of bookseller, the one who begins searching through the sea of used books for the books that they can imagine that there is a customer for. There is not a customer for every book. Of the new books that are printed, about five percent – or one in twenty – will never be bought for any price. They will be pulped and given a second chance as some other book (or as cardboard or paper plates or something else). Of the used books out there looking for a second home, many will find it is the recycling bin or (God Forbid) the trash. This feels sad, but it is a sadness that is, more often than not, a misplaced emotion.
Some books are made for the ages and some are not. Books can become physically unusable, and though there are many people incapable of imagining it, it is quite real. In the Talmud, we learn that an object that no longer has any use can longer carry or transmit ritual impurity. I didn’t understand why this could be until one of my first teachers explained, if objects that were so broken that they couldn’t be used for any useful purpose retained their ritually impure state, the world would become filled up with them. There would be no place for us to live. And so it is with used books. Those who cannot see their way to discarding what is useless become overwhelmed by the accumulation of useless things.
If we want a future, we need to discard the useless things from our past. Many people want to pass on the books that they have so that others can make use of what they no longer need; however, the wise among them often fear that they lack the ability to discern what among their old books continues to be useful and what isn’t. This discernment is the skill that I have honed over my many years in the book trade, the skill to imagine the potential customer with a use and willingness to invest some amount of their resources in acquiring that book. While there is a virtue in giving books away to people who need them, at least in the case of adults, the best test of whether someone really needs a book given for free is to know that they would have been willing to pay for it if they could. Gifting books well is as challenging as selling them.
Used books are always a product of the past that has been preserved somehow into the present. They were created with the intention of serving the needs of those who would acquire them as those needs existed in that moment. However, the way that people need books, in their shape, content and condition changes over time. The books of the past have to become the objects that are needed in the moment when the new owner acquires them. Some of the important changes that have occurred over time, since the invention of moveable type, include the development of navigational tools like title-pages, page numbers, indexes and tables of contents, book illustrations, lithography, linotype, paper made from wood pulp rather than rags, the public library, the commercial lending library, the introduction of the mass market paperback, and digital books. The advent of certain non-book technologies have had powerful effects on what kind of books are needed and or valued, such as the invention of photography, motion pictures, radio, television, the personal computer, the internet, the tablet computer and social media.
In the Jewish world, certain events changed the way that certain books became useful or not. Printed books did away with the need for manuscripts for the most part. Books that once were rare became common enough that people would willingly discard them. The Hasidic movement and later the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and the Mussar Movement created markets for books at the same time as they built their movements among their readers. The rise of modern Yiddish and modern Hebrew created a market for books in those languages. The Holocaust destroyed much of the market for Yiddish books and the evolution of Modern Hebrew in Israel undermined the value of the earlier Modern Hebrew books. The use of cheap low quality wood pulp paper stock in Eastern Europe led to the rapid deterioration of many of the books that were printed in Jewish languages in Europe before the war. American Jews became a strong market for Jewish books, and even as they became a good market for English language books, they became a poorer market for Hebrew and Yiddish books. Over time, the development of the State of Israel rendered many of the books published about Israel dated. Tastes in Jewish literature changed over the decades making some of the Jewish literature in any given language less desirable. Jewish books began to be printed on academic subjects. Over time academic fashions rendered some of those books out of date or out of fashion. The same can be said for all of the books that were created to educate Jewish children.
I remember visiting the library of a thriving Conservative synagogue. All of the books were hardcovers in dust jackets, all in excellent condition and wrapped in those plastic book jackets that you see on books at the library. It was very impressive. However, when I walked the shelves and looked at what was on the shelf I discovered that the vast majority of the books were those that had lost currency for the reading public. No one was ever going to open those books again. The world was already full of them. Perhaps somewhere someone might look at a copy, but if a thousand of them went in the recycling bin that day no one would have noticed.
On the other hand, twenty years ago I began concentrating on building a collection of books in Yiddish by women authors. It was a field that had received little attention beyond a handful of authors. Nevertheless, I imagined a future where that would no longer be the case and people would come for those books. And that future has come.
While I have developed the skill to judge what is of value on the bookshelf at the present and make good guesses about what will be of value in the future, I have not developed the same level of skill in judging the contents of our society and our country. The questions that I have been asking about Jewish Futurism and the Jewish Future are part of the process of developing that discernment. It is a skill that seems more urgently needed by the hour.
