This Is Not the End of the Book; What the Book is About

Now to the conversation in This Is Not the End of the Book; between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, steered now and then by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac.

This article is not a proper review of the This Is Not the End of the Book; -- more like an overview of some of the things I found particularly interesting.

The question then arises: How is a library to archive films? The storage formats change so fast. The question then becomes what gets obsolete first, because no matter what format a library chooses, in time they will have to transfer the information. And that’s where the physical presence of a book is so reassuring. Because even if there were to be no electricity, you would still be able to read an old-fashioned book. (Although with the advent of electric clothing, all that might change: we might be able to power devices like Kindle.)

Says philosopher Michel Serres, quoted by Jean-Claude Carrière. And yet, says Umberto Eco, we may need to continue to exercise our memory for the sake of our mental health. Also for our “intellectual freedom,” adds Eco.

Intellectual stimulation protects, to some extent, against degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, which, according to a study Jean-Claude Carrière brings to the table, now people develop at younger ages than in the past, as early as 45. Eco believes that for this reason and others, rote-learning still has its merits. As with all the topics, Jean-Claude Carrière has a rejoinder for this idea as well, saying that few people memorize as much as theatre actors, and yet many develop Alzheimer’s.

Says Jean-Claude Carrière, who tells us he liked all the “signs of movement, of life, of unresolved searching” that he used to make on a rough draft. He also says that when working on a film scene he needs to see it all at a glance, so he has to print it during his writing process in order to assess it.

Umberto Eco echoes Jean-Claude Carrière’s thoughts, saying that he uses up more paper now that he works on a computer, because it’s so easy to make corrections, print a draft, make more corrections, and print again.

But don’t be fooled, these people have read far, far more than the average passionate reader. Of course Eco hasn’t read all of his 60,000+ books in his library. Many of them are books he received from other people “as tributes;" he gives them to his students. How many rare books does he have? 1,200, he says. He has some nice stories about collecting some of them.

Then he has “a whole cellar full of translations” of his books. Being stuck with a few copies every time a book was translated (and his Name of the Rose was translated in 45 languages), he decided to send some of them away. He's also had his share of jury duty, and accumulated books from there as well. He says “the poets are by far the most dangerous.”

All this information might seem boring, but I find it’s rather funny that even in the age of so much electronic reading, we’re still inundated with books. Well, not we, but some people. Jean-Claude Carrière calculated, for fun, at some point in his life that, given a price of 6,000 euros per square meter, 12,000 euros per vertical meter, and the cost of making a bookcase, shelving each book cost him 42 euros.

Jean-Claude Carrière has 30,000 or 40,000 books, 2,000 of which are rare books.

Some booksellers are scrap dealers, destroying books to sell the plates individually at much cheaper prices. Collectors have an unwritten rule about avoiding such booksellers.

The most prized rare books are the 1623 Shakespeare Folio and the Gutenberg Bible. The last Gutenberg Bible sold for 3 or 4 million dollars, about 20 years ago. Copies of the Folio are also off the market nowadays.

The Conquistadors and missionaries to the New World destroyed all codices about Mayan and Aztec life except a few. There now remain 3 Mayan codices. Aztec manuscripts were also destroyed; we’d do well to learn more about Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan friar, who saved Aztec manuscripts and had them copied, in a set of 12 books known as the Florentine Codex (first published in its entirety in 1979). This codex is the most important document about pre-Colonial Aztec culture.

The Florentine Codex, Historia general de las cosas de nueva España (General history of the things of New Spain), is available as of November 2012 at the World Digital Library. NB: I tried accessing the images, and while I did get a list of them, I could see only the first image.

You can look at the whole spectrum of Spanish literature today, and won’t find “a single erotic text published before the second half of the twentieth century.” Could that be? Jean-Claude Carrière argues that the Spanish Inquisition wiped out the propensities.

In 1911, French linguist and archaeologist Paul Pelliot and a German team discovered 70,000 manuscripts in a cave in China, created before the tenth century. About twenty thousand of these manuscripts are now at the Bibliothèque Nationale in the Pelliot collection.

This great discovery included 2 formerly lost languages and “the only Manichaean text we know of that was written (in Chinese) by the Manichaeans themselves rather than by their enemies.”