Vintage Books

While there has been a lot of debate about how e-books will change the world and literature as we know it, I have to admit I’m still stuck in the past about books. And I’m not even talking about paper vs. electronic, I’m talking about current book publications vs. vintage publications.

As someone who frequents used bookstores and antique shops on a nearly weekly basis, I’ve seen my fair share of vintage books. And even here at Susquehanna University, our library is filled with ancient books and publications. And I’ve noticed something. Vintage books are a lot more simple, both in presentation and in the structure of the book itself, while today’s books primarily act as posters for intellectualism.

Today’s books are excessively colorful, made with thicker paper, and are full of extra pages to fluff them up. They are also much larger. This is reflected in the price. It’s appalling when a paperback costs over 15 dollars and it isn’t a graphic novel. It’s a plot to make more money. If the book is more attractive, the public will be more likely to buy it, even if it costs a lot more than it should.

The focus in vintage books seems to be the work itself—just the author, the title, and the story. The books are rather small. The simplicity of the book made it less costly than books today. I currently own a book of criticism about J.D. Salinger from the 196os. It cost 50 cents, which is approximately 4 dollars by today’s value. It is over 300 pages long. I sincerely doubt that a book of such length would cost less than 10 dollars in today’s market.

Now, books convey the illusion of intelligence and satisfy the consumerist desire of owning interesting, eye-catching books, rather than on owning books for the work itself. Books contain so many forewords and afterwords, and introductions and appendices that they add hundreds of pages, raising the cost, rather than letting the work stand on its own. This seems the fault of critical theory and snobby elitism, but I digress. The point is, books have lost touch with what they are.

I recently purchased a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass published in 1970 for a dollar at a local used bookstore. The cover is plain, white, and has green lettering in the top left hand corner that reads “Leaves of Grass: Selections. Whitman.” And then, in tiny print, the editor of the edition. That’s it. The title of the work, the author, and the editor. There is no fluff in the book’s presentation.

A current copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass has a close up of grass as the cover, with a large central plate that looks like old paper, with a bright red border. In the middle of this plate is the title and the author’s name in large fancy font.  Is this really necessary? We all know what grass looks like, do we need to include it on the cover? Does it add to our enjoyment of Whitman’s words? Not really.

Are we no longer drawn to the works themselves? Only by the images or ideas of them? Yes, it is true that book publishers did not include fancy pictures and type settings on their old books because they didn’t have the technology to do so. However, just because they have the technology doesn’t mean they have to use it. There has to be a marketable reason to use it, otherwise the cost outweighs the profit. As humans, we are drawn to pictures rather than words. In the “old days” the books that primarily had cover art were pulp novels and science fiction, usually showing some damsel in distress getting attacked or stalked by an alien or a man with a gun. These covers were used to draw in the readers and sell these penny-dreadfuls. Now, nearly all covers are marketing ploys, with some author’s face plastered on the cover, reaching out to the easily swayed. For a fantasy fan, a book with a dragon on the cover may be the reason to buy it. This is kind of sickening. Literature has fallen to the same level of marketing as a box of cereal.

Granted, this is a generalization based on personal experiences, but I have actually met people who have purchased a book solely on the cover art. Bookstores are not galleries. We are not buying the art, we are buying the words. Bookstores have become capitalist ventures, even more so than they already have.

We don’t need the extra presentation or the extra cost. Go to a used bookstore or a thrift store and buy the classics for considerably cheaper prices and you won’t lose any of the impact of the works themselves. An older edition might have some fascinating differences from the updated versions.  Literature shouldn’t be about money or fancy pictures. Yet it has become so, and now with the advent of e-books, it has also become about convenience and keeping up with technology. But that’s a blog post for another time.

Zombie typewriters? They’re back from the dead.

To most people, typewriters are an archaic hunk of metal sitting in an antique shop or thrift store, waiting out their last days. Ribbons drying up, keys locking, wasting away, until someone stumbles in and decides to take it home out of curiosity. Apparently, this is becoming quite common. Common enough, it seems, that there is a “typewriter revival” dating back to as early as 2005.

In a world full of technology, some people are turning to this seemingly extinct device to write upon. The truth is that typewriters were never truly extinct. Staples still sells typewriters, the NYPD still uses typewriters (although the officers don’t seem to be too fond of them), and there are plenty of websites dedicated to refurbishing them and selling them. Granted, the ones at Staples are slightly more advanced, but I digress. The point is, people are using them. Why would someone do such a thing? There are several reasons: practical ones, pretentious ones, and artistic ones.

In today’s technology-laden world, some people feel like using a typewriter is an escape from all the distractions of the computer. There’s no spider solitaire, no Twitter and Facebook, no World of Warcraft. Just you and the written word. The typewriter isn’t too dissimilar from the computer so that the user is completely new to it. After all, the typewriter is the origin for our QWERTY keyboard. And a page on the typewriter looks like a page on a word processing program without a toolbar, or for the few who had one when they were new, simply a word processing machine without the on switch and monitor.

Some might argue that a pen and paper will do just fine; that there is a better connection with the written word when you’re actually writing the words. Others might feel that the computer is better, because you can edit and revise as much you want without having to use white out. Others say it doesn’t matter what you write with, but what you write in terms of content (as a previous blogger wrote). But some feel like the typewriter is the perfect tool. Because fixing mistakes on a typewritten sheet is such a pain, people are less likely to type without thinking. With a typewriter one doesn’t have to worry about it crashing and losing all of the things they just wrote (weeping and cursing the electronics), or turning it on in the morning and waiting for what seems like hours (especially with Vista) for it to just stop blinking its green light and let you work on something. Not the typewriter; it’s just sitting there, completely functional and ready to go. Computers can become obsolete within a few months of purchase as better, faster software is released. Also, computers often have an extremely short lifespan and don’t come in nearly as many colors (Seventies orange? Dove grey? Prussian blue? Beat that, Dell.). Some people feel comforted by a typewriter’s durability; after 50 years, the machine still works perfectly fine.

Others feel they simply write better on a typewriter. With word-processing programs a person can simply delete a previous sentence and start over. With a typewriter, the words are literally engraved into the page. A person has to think carefully before they type a sentence, unless they wish to waste sheaves of paper or spend lots of money on new ribbons. Hipsters and other overly pretentious people, however, just want to look oh-so-unique writing on some vintage or obsolete typewriter and picture themselves as the future Hemingway or Thompson. For older people, they are just used to it, and don’t feel like dealing with all that newfangled technology.

Whatever the reasons, typewriters seem to be making a comeback. Based on the amount of interest in them, and the fact that typewriter repairmen still exist in the world, it is a testament to how lasting and useful the machine is. And apparently, it’s going to last for a while longer.

Some lovely points are made in the following blog entry:

http://www.strikethru.net/2007/08/typecast-10-things-i-notice-about-using.html

(I’d also like to note that this blog is a wealth of information about the topic of typewriters and ephemera.)

This is the article from 2005: http://www.billingsgazette.com/news/national/article_ca3ff26a-822d-5ac8-8824-edc0b525d762.html