Anyone visiting my house for even a few minutes can see what a book lover I am.  Casa del Garrett is full of book cases and book shelves and they’re full of books I’ve been collecting since I was a kid.  Somehow during the move from Rockville to Baltimore I lost two boxes full of paperbacks and I still grieve over the loss of some of them.  But to all you Star Trek fans out there I still have, for example, a bunch of first editions of James Blish’s Star Trek books, including a first printing of Spock Must Die which was the first original Star Trek novel ever published. 

I have a first printing of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 in paperback, first editions in hardback of all his later sequels, 2010, 2061, and 3001.  A first hardback edition of The Songs of Distant Earth.  A first paperback printing of his Fountains of Paradise.  I have hardback first editions of Mary Renault’s The Fire From Heaven and The Persian Boy, and the paperback first edition of Funeral Games.  The seemingly odd mix of hardback and paperback editions tracks with times I had the money for the hardback and times I didn’t.

I have tons of other first editions on my bookshelves.  I tell you this not to present myself as a book collector, but just simply as a reader.  I keep nearly all the books I read.  Unless I really hate it, like I absolutely despise Frank Herbert’s Soul Catcher, which I threw across the room when I was finished with it, or unless a book bores me to tears, it will generally find a permanent home on my shelves..not as a collector’s item, but as something to pick up and read a passage from again, if not the whole thing, every so often. 

I love books.  They have been my escape ever since I was a kid. I can’t remember how many times I got caught in class reading a paperback hidden behind a textbook.  One teacher, who managed to make the history of World War II boring, gave me a good chewing out in front of the class for about ten minutes, demanding to know if my copy of Louis L’amour’s Flint was more important then history class.  It was all I could do to keep biting my tongue and not telling him no, just his history class.

I love to read.  I spend more time at home now web surfing then watching TV because it is an act of reading and what is more, discovering links between the things I am reading and other things I’ve never read before, as opposed to passively being entertained by the tube.  I am not at all averse to seeing words on a computer screen.  In fact I love it.  I love the way one thing can link to another, and then to another still.   I love how you can browse entire libraries of books and essays and articles on this and that all from home.  The Internet is the best encylopedia ever, the best instruction manual ever, the best library ever.  You can explore.  And it took me all of about a minute to get sick, thoroughly sick, of the hype over Amazon’s new Kindle…which is like the old Kindle, only new. 

Yes books take up space.  Yes, it would be nice to be able to read anything from my personal library while away from home.  Books weigh tons.  I’ve moved several times on the way from Rockville where I grew up to Casa del Garrett and I can tell you almost half the mass of moving my stuff is in the form of books…many, many boxes of them that just about break your back.  It would be nice to just have much of it, if not all, in electric form.  There’s a scene in Arthur C. Clarke’s The Songs of Distant Earth, where a space traveler reverently takes out of a sealed container his prize posession: a first edition of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.  It was a prize because books off earth were so rare…almost non-existant.  If our books are to journey with us to the stars, they’ll have to weigh a whole lot less.

But here’s the problem:  Suppose you were offered a book that could only be read with a pair of reading glasses made by the publisher of the book.  Oh…and the glasses will cost you $360 dollars.  But you could use them to read a whole lot of other books from that same publisher.  But all those books could only be read by those glasses.  And whether or not those glasses kept on working was solely at the discretion of the publisher of those books.  Doesn’t take much thinking to realize that all you are buying when you purchase those books, is a dust jacket only those glasses can open up…not the right to read what is inside.  Those books can be closed forever to you, at the discretion of the publisher, at any time.

And it gets worse.  Suppose somebody decides that the contents of a particular book are offensive in some way.  Maybe its sex.  Maybe it’s political.  Maybe its an expose’ of corporate malfeasance that somebody in some corporate boardroom somewhere decides you shouldn’t be able to read anymore.  A flick of the switch from corporate headquarters and any book in that library suddenly vanishes…like it never existed.  And it happens to all the copies of that book, in everyone’s personal library, all over the world.  Just like that.  Snap.  Gone.  Censorship was never so easy, so simple, so beautifully invisiable.  What book?  There was never any such book.

No thank you.  I learned to read before I entered grade school.  I still remember a bit of how difficult it was to get what all those marks on the paper were telling me.  But mom was patient and eventually I got the hang of it and that was my key to the world books opened up for me.  And what a world.  Down the Navajo Trail, along the back alleys and side streets of Old London, across the sea to Treasure Island, down Persia to Babylon with Alexander and through the stargate and back again.  Corporate America can have my ability to read when they pry it from my cold dead eyes.