Friends of the Libraries' Guest Columnist Features Books, libraries - gifts to the world By Bryian E. Winner December 12, 2005 The Athens Messenger

"A room without books is like a body without a soul" - Cicero

Every day I deal with millions of electronic bits of information. Data flows from one place to another touching the farthest reaches of the globe. And still many of us, myself included in that group, seek comfort in something as simple as a book. You never hear anyone getting a cup of coffee and curling up next to the fire with a good keyboard. No, we have a fascination for the bound word that is beyond the actual meaning it carries. Today we have access to more information than any other generation to have ever lived on this planet, yet we still have places like the library, and, as a whole mankind is better for it. It is a simple structure that houses an archaic form of information storage. A book is a fiber pulp hard drive, in a sense. The language it speaks is the catalog systems and it is the people who work there who give it the power to do what it should. Libraries can be scanned and packed on a computer hard drive, yet in this form they seem to lose their soul.

Somehow the bound word in physical form becomes larger in meaning than the sum total of the words used to convey a contained idea. Perhaps the word "soul" is inadequate, it is more the "ether of intelligence made manifest." I think you can tell I hold the book itself in high esteem. I would say I am not alone. One of the original Seven Wonders of the World was the Library at Alexandria, Egypt until it was destroyed. It was a grand repository of the sum total of human knowledge in its time and available to everyone. Yet, in all our greatness it was not until recently that the Library at Alexandria has been rebuilt. I have held in my hands books over 500 years old. If you listen closely, with the right kind of mindset, you can almost hear the history radiate from it. The book we make today is a gift to 100 generations from now, our way of extending our hand out through time to remind them that we were here. As we look at the libraries today, you can see the ones long gone before us, reaching out to us to share their lessons. We are here for just a short time so it is our duty to be caretakers of the precious gift for the future as those who came before us have done.

We place so much emphasis on the electronic age and its television, radio, cell phones, and email that crowd our daily lives and the airwaves. But consider this: just 100 years ago the airwaves were silent. There was nothing, but the printed word, the humble book. Perhaps Cicero had it right.

Bryan E Winner is an Athens resident and part owner of A.C.M.E. (Athens Computers and Multimedia Enterprises). He is an avid reader, bookbinder, blacksmith, fencing coach and occasional writer of science fiction. The Friends of the Libraries of Ohio University sponsor this monthly feature.