Briscoe,
Peter. The Best Read Man in France: a Cautionary Tale ([S.l.]:
Borgo Press, c2007) 119 p.
This
story has a message: that librarians are the guardians of precious
and sometimes irreplaceable books. A rare book dealer who buys and
sells with libraries all over the world bemoans the trend toward
digitization which often involves the destruction of bindings that
will never be mended. Nevertheless he becomes romantically involved
with Elizabeth Wyatt, the Digital Resources Librarian at a large
American University. When the dealer begins a public protest he finds
he is not alone.
The
next morning he was at the door of the library. To his astonishment
he was soon joined by another picketer, a tall, thin,
scraggly-bearded graduate student in English. His sign read:
LIBRARIANS
THE
ENEMIES OF BOOKS
Michael
was overjoyed by the support, but thought the sign might be going a
little too far. The student replied, “No, no, it's an old
controversy. In the eighteenth century Edward Young said:
Unlearned
men of books assume the care,
As
eunuchs are the guardians of the fair.
“Well,
I would hardly call librarians ignorant. Many of them hold advanced
degrees.”
“True,
but something has gone awry in Libraryland. I have an inside source,
who shall remain nameless, but who fills me in. The modern librarian
is basically a shill for the Info Industry. It's a shame that
taxpayers and tuition payers still have to bear the cost of their
salaries, which more properly should be paid by their corporate
masters. Their so-called business and contract negotiations with
predatory electronic publishers for obscenely expensive databases,
electronic journals, and e-books are little more than mating rituals.
But in the end there's no question who remains the dominant partner
flying ever higher, and who's left to sit on the eggs.” (p. 94-95).
This
modern action is compared with the experience of the seventeenth
century French librarian Gabriel Naudé. He assembled the finest
library of the time for his master Cardinal Mazarin only to see it
dismantled and sold by the Cardinal's enemies.
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