Teaser Tuesdays: Codex

Since I'm still reading the same books I was reading last Tuesday, for today's teaser I'm using lines from a book I read several years ago. I've been looking back through some of my reading journals and this is one passage that jumped out at me. It's a little longer than two lines, but it seems so relevant to the current debate about paper vs. electronic books, I thought I'd include the whole thing (sorry - I'll make up for it next week). In Lev Grossman's novel Codex from 2004, Edward Wozny, a young banker, is asked to help one of his firm's most important clients organize a library of rare books. In this bit, Edward has just encountered the library for the first time:

He was treating these books like they were holy relics...there was something magnetic about them, something that compelled respect, even the silly ones, like the Enlightenment treatise about how lightning was caused by bees. They were information, data, but not in the form he was used to dealing with it. They were non-digital, nonelectrical chunks of memory, not stamped out of silicon but laboriously crafted out of wood pulp and ink, leather and glue. Somebody had cared enough to write these things; somebody else had cared enough to buy them, possibly even read them, at the very least keep them safe for 150 years, sometimes longer, when they could have vanished at the touch of a spark. That made them worth something, didn't it, just by itself? [Chapter 4, p. 57]

Well, I'd certainly go along with those sentiments. But then, I have the soul of a librarian.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or take part yourself, just head on over to her blog.

And please feel free to leave me a link to your Teaser Tuesday post in a comment here.