Celebrating the power of the word

What does it mean to say that one loves books? It might mean that one is an avid reader. But there is another kind of love for books, which entails an appreciation of books -- and other forms of the written word -- as actual physical objects, be they modern books, medieval codices, papyrus scrolls, inscribed tablets of clay or stone or messages slipped into bottles.

If anyone has established his bona fides as a bibliophile, it is Nicholas A. Basbanes, author of “A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books” and “Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture.” His new book, “A Splendor of Letters,” completes what is described as a trilogy. Like its predecessors, it is a wide-ranging, anecdotal survey of books and those who have read, collected and preserved them through the centuries. And, although it is his third book on this subject, he certainly has not run out of steam, for in it, he describes some of the most poignant and powerful instances of humanity’s continuing need to communicate across the relentless, ineluctable barrier of time.

There is also the other side of the coin. Basbanes quotes the words of author Alberto Manguel: “Trust in the survival of the word, as well as the urge to destroy it, is as old as the first clay tablets.” In his fourth and fifth chapters, Basbanes writes about the willful destruction of the written word, which has often gone hand in hand with the destruction of individuals, cultures and peoples, from the Romans’ destruction of Carthage to such 20th century horrors as the Nazis’ war against European Jewry and the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields, where a thin line on the bridge of the nose, indicating that someone may have worn eyeglasses, was enough to condemn that person to death.

Yet even amid such dangers, people have clung to the slender hope that their written words, hidden away, might bear witness to the truth. In the Warsaw ghetto, historian Emmanuel Ringelblum, who later helped organize the armed uprising crushed by the Nazis in 1943, headed a secret effort to preserve the history of the ghetto. As the inhabitants were rounded up and sent to the death camp at Treblinka, he wrote, “Only a handful of our friends kept pencil in hand to write about what was happening.... But the work was too holy for us, it was too deep in our hearts ... we could not stop.”

Unwittingly corroborating this testimony, the Nazis proudly kept records of their atrocities, unlike the Stalinist regime, which preferred to rewrite history. “Russian censors,” notes Basbanes, “commonly used the phrases ‘covered with caviar’ to describe the act of obscuring objectionable material with thick black ink, and ‘covered with sour cream’ for whiting out discredited words with heavy dabs of correction fluid.”

Basbanes takes us from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day Sarajevo, from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels to the ongoing work of the Armenian monks of San Lazzaro to preserve their country’s ancient and imperiled culture. We meet E. Gene Smith, an American collector who has almost single-handedly rescued the bulk of Tibetan writings, not to mention “Dave the Potter,” one of the many slaves in the American South who defied the law, risking life and limb to learn to read and write, and who boldly inscribed his name and writings onto his ceramic handicrafts.

Not all, or even perhaps most, losses are the result of deliberate destruction. Accident, fire, flood and simple lack of interest have also played their parts. Basbanes shows us how important seemingly unimportant things can turn out to be. A tablet from the administrative records of a vanished city may provide us with a key to understanding a lost world. In the wake of the destruction and disappearance of countless texts from the classical world, a medieval author’s reference to one or more of these missing works can at least serve to give us some idea of what they were about.

A conservationist at heart, Basbanes is also uneasily aware of the counter-problem: the crushing mountain of unformed information that threatens to overwhelm us, making it as difficult to locate what is worthwhile as it is to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. Basbanes quotes the Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco on the current overload: “The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything, reliable material and crazy material.... So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate? The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.”

But what strikes one culture as worthy of preservation may strike a subsequent culture as worthless, as when some medieval Christian scribes, stymied by a shortage of affordable parchment, scraped away the words of important classical authors (mere “pagans”) to make room for lists of “modern” liturgical practices. The preservation of the past is a problem with no easy solutions, but in reading this balanced and inclusive survey, we are made aware of the pressing need for seriously thoughtful ones.