Afterword - speech from 1991 Sol M. Malkin Lecture in Bibliography

Library Trends, Summer, 2003 by Terry Belanger

ON 16 DECEMBER 1991, I gave the seventh Sol M. Malkin Lecture in Bibliography on "The Future of Rare Book Libraries" at the School of Library Service (SLS), Columbia University." (In assessing this honor, bear in mind that I am the person principally responsible for selecting Malkin Lecturers.) The Book Arts Press published the first six Malkin Lectures as separate pamphlets, most of them elegantly designed and printed by the Stinehour Press--but not mine: The Trustees of Columbia University closed their SLS at the end of the 1991-92 academic year; on the day I gave the Malkin Lecture, I contented myself by putting its text onto ExLibris, the (then new) electronic bulletin board, and I moved on to deal with other matters.

There has been some continuing interest in the lecture in the dozen years since it was first given. In 2002, I reprised it at UCLA and at Rare Book School in Charlottesville, with commentary--with the result that I am now receiving requests for both lecture and commentary. It seems sensible to put both into print now: accordingly, here follows the original 1991 lecture (as delivered except for the removal of a few topical comments), followed by a commentary, and--experience teaches me nothing--accompanied by some current prognostications on the future of rare book libraries, much enriched by my reading of the articles in this issue of Library Trends.

1991 LECTURE

According to the Chinese lunar calendar, we are just now coming to the end of the Year of the Goat (hold that thought, please). For me, however, 1991 has been the year of the Crystal Ball.

In February of this year, I gave a lecture entitled "Reflections by the Captain of the Iceberg" to the Colophon Club of San Francisco in which I made various prognostications regarding events in the rare book world during the next ten years. This lecture will be published in a few months by the Bibliographical Society of London as the coda to a volume of essays celebrating the centenary of the Society.

Then in March of this year, at a conference in Iowa organized by Timothy Barrett to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the introduction of papermaking into the United States, I gave a talk which I was asked to repeat in September at the Madison, Wisconsin, "Whither the Book?" conference organized by Barbara Tetenbaum: my title there was "The Future of the Book (If Any)." This talk will appear in print either in the proceedings of the Wisconsin conference or (if those proceedings are not published separately) then most likely in W. Thomas Taylor's new journal, Bookways.

Last month, I gave a Hanes Lecture at the University of North Carolina on "Education for Books as Physical Objects," and I read a revised version of this paper, in which I had a fair amount to say about the future of rare book librarianship, a week later at the Houghton Library at Harvard; this lecture will eventually be published by North Carolina. [2003: None of these lectures was ever published.] I was honored to have been invited to deliver the 1991 Hanes Lecture; I have fewer reasons for pride on being invited to deliver this, the 1991 Malkin Lecture, given the composition of the selection committee. If I have no reason for self-congratulation on being invited to speak to you tonight, nevertheless I am pleased to have the opportunity to round off my collection of 1991 FutureSpeaks with a meditation on "The Future of Rare Book Libraries."

There are few better ways of making a fool of yourself than by trying to predict the future. In 1965, the political scientist Karl Deutsch was asked to speculate about life in the year 2000, then thirty-five years away. His assignment, he said, was like being asked to talk about the year 1800 from the vantage point of the year 1765 (predict the coming of steam power and the effects of industrialization, the revolutions in France and America, and the rise of mass armies), or to talk about the year 1900 from the vantage point of the year 1865 (predict the use of electricity as a source of energy and the development of the internal combustion engine, the rise of labor unions, and the high-water mark of imperialism and colonialism (Deutsch, 1967, p. 659).

But if predicting the future is a foolhardy undertaking, it is not always an impossible one; and the exercise is a potentially useful and possibly essential mechanism for dealing with areas of concern in which rapid change is occurring.

I am convinced that rare book libraries both in the United States and worldwide are in fact at the beginning of a succession of cataclysmic transformations. The most important of these changes will be caused by the increasing disinclination of most general research libraries over the next several decades to continue to maintain large, permanent collections of paper-based books of any sort, rare or non-rare.

This is not to predict that research libraries are going to go entirely out of the codex book business, but rather to say that they will increasingly look upon their current book stock as a convenience collection, to be used and eventually disposed of without remorse. Much of the paper-based information we use at present is already generated from electronic originals owned by publishers and by them constantly updated, corrected, expanded, improved, and regularly republished in paper-based form for the use of purchasers in a handy codex format. In the future, readers are increasingly going to have direct online access to electronic text and data files containing the materials they require; and increasingly, they will perceive that they do not ever need and do not ever want access in printed form to the bulk of this material--a circumstance already routinely the case with users of large online databases. The big change is yet to come, because most journals and monographs are not yet available to their end-users in machine-readable form. But soon enough they will be; and then, there go the stacks.