The new piece is called:

Tall, White, and Visually Implausible

You can read it here.

—Brian

There’s a book on my shelf that I’ve been meaning to read for some time now. There’s no particular reason I haven’t. It’s not a large book. It’s not a complex book. In fact, it’s a classic, something I probably should have read by now, but in any case, certainly worth cracking open.

More importantly, there’s an expectation it would be read.

That’s me projecting. But when an inscribed book is gifted by a relative higher up in the org chart—in this case, an Aunt, Aunt Claire—there are expectations.

We recommend restaurants. Suggest plumbers, mechanics, and doctors. Insist on movies and TV shows you “just have to watch.” These are the casual advocacies we dispense freely, quickly forgotten if no one follows through.

But a book? That’s altogether different.

Nobody gifts a book they finished with a resounding sigh. The books we give are the ones that changed lives—most importantly, our own. We pass them on wrapped in altruism, with a faint but unmistakable hint of narcissism inside.

Our relationship with books is personal. And when they pass from our hands to others we have expectations, a desire for them to travel a certain path with a specific outcome. It’s a human trait, no more unique to a random relative than to a billionaire.

Like J.P. Morgan.

Morgan was already one of the most powerful men in America when he started seriously collecting in the 1890s. He built a private library adjacent to his Manhattan townhouse and filled it with the rarest books money could buy. And for decades, it stayed exactly as he wanted: closed.

Well, mostly closed. To avoid import taxes on the treasures he was hauling back from Europe, Morgan was required to open the library to the public. He complied, barely—by appointment only, to ‘scholars’ who could prove they had legitimate reasons for being there.

But then life intervened in the form of death, which can be inconvenient for men accustomed to being in charge, so Morgan tried to maintain control of his books from beyond the grave.

His will is often quoted as evidence of noble intent. He wrote that it had been his “desire and intention” to make the collection “permanently available for the instruction and pleasure of the American people”—a sentence that sounds generous until you read the rest.

He didn’t say open to the public. He didn’t say free access. Instead: “some suitable disposition... of such portion... as I might determine,” then left “the whole subject, without recommendation or restriction” to his son.

In other words: Do whatever you think is appropriate, Jack.

Jack Morgan took the wink, the nod, and the hint. In 1924, he incorporated the library as a “public institution,” then restricted access to ten researchers at a time, by appointment only.

For eighteen years, that counted as public.

In justifying this arrangement, the younger Morgan was quoted as saying, “After all, one soiled thumb could undo the work of 900 years.”

Fair point. Imagine what a toe could do.

Fast forward to 1942, when NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, an urban populist who had a particular interest in ensuring tax-exempt cultural institutions actually served the public, finally decided to call their bluff.

So he sued.

The New York Supreme Court sided with the library, ruling that they were in fact public and could keep their tax exemption. But the publicity from the trial changed everything.

The U.S. was in the middle of World War II and public sentiment had soured on the excess and privilege of Gilded Age holdouts. To avoid future challenges, the library began opening its doors wider—public exhibitions, broader access, a genuine effort to look like what they’d been calling themselves for nearly two decades.

One month after the court’s ruling, Jack Morgan, the last of the legacy protectors, died, and the private era was over.

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If J.P. Morgan couldn’t control the destiny of his books, what chance did Aunt Claire have?

We don’t explicitly know what her wishes were, but from the inscription, the implication is clear:

Dearest Rebecca,

I first read this when I was your age, and I’m not sure I’ve truly left the moors since. They call it a romance, but it is really a thunderstorm in a book. I see that same restless spark in your eyes that I had then, and I suspect you’ll find the “darkness” of Heathcliff just as thrilling as I did.

Read it when the wind is up. I expect we shall have much to discuss.

With all my love, Aunt Claire 1994

Who knows what happened after that. Maybe she gave it to Rebecca. Maybe Rebecca loved it and discussed it with Claire over tea. Maybe Rebecca never opened it. Or perhaps Claire forgot to give it to her and it sat in a drawer until she died.

We don’t know because Claire was nobody important. Not a titan of industry. Not a cultural benefactor. Just another person moving through life with the quiet anonymity that awaits most of us—no foundation, no heirs fighting over intentions, no New York Times coverage, no scholars, no court cases, no mayor stepping in to correct the record.

Morgan’s failure is documented. Aunt Claire’s is uncertain.

All I know for sure is that her gift of Wuthering Heights now sits on my shelf.

Books skip across people like stones across water. Where they touch down—Rebecca or a stranger, scholars or subway commuters, the intended recipient or someone decades later who paid four dollars for it at a rummage sale—the book doesn’t particularly care.

But I do. So after I read it, I’ll append Aunt Claire’s inscription with one of my own. I don’t think she’d mind.

To a future reader,

Aunt Claire wrote to Rebecca. I knew neither, but I’m writing to you.

No matter if you’re a distant offshoot from the family tree, or a random stranger who found this in a thrift store, as I did, you’re as unfamiliar to me as I am to you. But this book found you. And that means something.

What happens with it from here is up to you.

But not really.

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Dig Deeper:

• How to Write the Perfect Book Inscription — Penguin UK

• The Morgan Library & Museum — TheMorgan.org

• Signed vs. Inscribed — Ken Lopez Bookseller

The Bibliophile: Everything you love about books — except the reviews.

Before you stands an overwhelming array of options. Choose right and your craving is satisfied; choose wrong and you walk away unsated, slightly ashamed, and poorer by a couple bucks.

A chocolate bar? No. That bag of nacho cheese Doritos? Maybe. Definitely not the trail mix—nobody is supposed to buy something healthy, even semi-healthy, from a vending machine. And then you spot it: the perfect antidote to your craving. A brand-new edition of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

All new ideas start with a tiny rebellion

The story begins, as many good stories do, with a man dodging the law.

In 1822, English bookseller Richard Carlile invented what may have been the first book vending machine. His goal wasn’t convenience; it was self-preservation. Carlile was peddling seditious works like Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and kept finding himself in court for “blasphemous libel.” So he built a self-service contraption that let customers buy banned books without ever coming into contact with him.

It’s unclear whether the device was truly automatic—but it didn’t prevent the authorities from prosecuting one of his assistants for selling books the Empire deemed unfit for polite society.

Still, Carlile’s machine was less an invention than a provocation. A middle finger made of metal. A mechanical loophole that protested with gears, allowing dangerous ideas to circulate freely.

The first book vending machine wasn’t about commerce. It was about subversion. Punk rock before The Pistols.

Penguins, paperbacks, and platform stalls

More than a century later, another publishing heretic gave the idea a second life.

In 1937, Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books, installed a device called the Penguincubator near London’s Charing Cross Station. It dispensed high-quality paperbacks—Hemingway, Woolf, Christie—for the price of a pack of cigarettes.

Lane’s mission wasn’t to sneak around the censors but to undermine the snobbery of the book trade. He wanted good literature to live not just in bookstores but in railway stations, tobacconists, and corner shops. To Lane, a paperback wasn’t a cheaper book; it was an act of democracy.

The Penguincubator didn’t catch on. Perhaps it was too odd, too literal a metaphor. Still, its spirit endured. Every airport bookstore, every two-for-one classics display, owes something to Lane’s stubborn belief that culture should be as accessible as candy.

The midcentury machine dream

After the war, America took its turn. The country that had already mechanized nearly everything decided to mechanize literature too.

In 1947, Popular Science featured the Book-O-Mat, a metal box offering fifty titles for twenty-five cents apiece. Two years later, the jukebox company Rock-Ola introduced an upgraded model, promising operators a slice of the “multi-million dollar paperback book business.”

It was a perfect midcentury fantasy: literature with a coin slot. No clerks, no conversation, just a crisp rectangle of enlightenment dropping with a clunk.

But books, it turns out, make terrible vending products. They’re bulky, irregularly shaped, and require an emotional investment, the opposite of an impulse item, particularly when you’re rushing to catch your train.

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The Biblio-Mat: Serendipity over selection

If the Book-O-Mat was commerce’s attempt to sell literature, the Biblio-Mat is literature’s revenge.

Installed in 2012 inside The Monkey’s Paw bookstore in Toronto, the Biblio-Mat dispenses random used books. You insert a coin—well, a Canadian coin—a bell rings, and an unseen mechanism spits out your fate: an old dictionary, a forgotten travelogue, maybe a biography of a minor Hungarian composer.

“You don’t choose the book,” said Stephen Fowler, the shop’s owner and creator of the machine. “The universe chooses it for you.”

It’s both absurd and beautiful—a vending machine that understands how unsuited vending is to books. The inverse of the sterile algorithms that have made discovery feel mechanical, it offers surprise, whimsy, and the thrill of relinquishing control.

Putting the machines in their place

Every generation rediscovers the idea of vending books. Carlile wanted freedom, Lane wanted democracy, Rock-Ola wanted profit, and the Biblio-Mat just wanted to amuse us.

But books will never vend well—at least not commercially.

That’s comforting. Knowing that in a world of digital downloads and drone deliveries, a book remains a stubbornly human object, to be browsed, handled, judged by covers and weight and scent. They’re not consumed; they’re experienced.

Book vending machines still exist, but flourish most where profit isn’t the point, where they can put a book in hands that might not otherwise reach the shelf, and where a library card, not cash, is the price of admission.

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Dig Deeper:

• Richard Carlile: free press, women’s rights, and intellectual rebellion — Spartacus Educational

• The 1937 Penguincubator — Mental Floss

• The mechanics behind the Biblio-Mat — Vimeo

The Bibliophile: Everything you love about books — except the reviews.

He that would steal a book would steal a kingdom.

-William Camden

Dante organized Hell into nine circles, each calibrated to the specific gravity of the sin. It’s an elegant system, a convenient framework for casting stones at others. Yet for all the centuries spent refining it, theologians have never quite agreed on the finer placements—who belongs where, and how far down they fall.

It leaves something out.

Somewhere in the upper registers, well below the book burners and banners, just above the defacers, sits another category entirely: the biblioklept.

The book thief.

Guilty, to be sure. But a creature whose crime has a particular flavor, a wrong sometimes committed in the name of something that looks, from the right angle, exactly like love.

The ISBN Mercenary

Scan. Reject. Scan. Reject. Scan. Pocket. This is the rhythm of the ISBN mercenary. A middleman of the mundane, a man who wouldn’t know a first edition from a book club reprint if the algorithm didn’t tell him.

He is a common thief. A book thief only in the sense that today the object happens to be a book. Tomorrow it might be a backpack, a power tool, a stack of printer cartridges. The objects change. The intent does not.

Books are his prey because they are inventory. He is a book thief by convenience, by efficiency, by happenstance. If bicycles scanned better than paperbacks, he would be a bicycle thief. If copper wire could ship via Media Mail, he would be in the electrical aisle.

He doesn’t love the book. He loves the listing.

The book thief who wants money is not, in the end, a very interesting problem. He wants something. He takes it. The transaction is legible, the motive uncomplicated, pedestrian. It’s retail background noise, something between a nuisance and an accounting entry. A small thorn in loss prevention’s side, solved with duplicates on the shelf, a quick reorder from the publisher, and an insurance claim.

More interesting is the thief touched by what Nicholas Basbanes calls the “gentle madness,” the pathological librarian, not stealing but curating, gathering the books that deserve gathering, in whose presence the security system becomes essentially decorative.

Don't Call It Stealing

Stephen Blumberg had a language problem—or rather, a language solution.

Theft is a clean word. Transactional, directional, unambiguous. You had it. Now I have it. But Blumberg never used it, even internally. That was where his vocabulary shifted. Books were relocated. Rescued. Placed into proper custody.

All 23,600 of them.

The specifics were never revealed, but geography and distance point to Alaska and Hawaii. Common sense suggests one or both of the Dakotas. Throw in one of the lesser populated states like Wyoming or Montana and we can safely infer the five states the FBI says Blumberg didn’t steal books from over his 20-year campaign.

In total, 268 libraries lost volumes to Blumberg, all of which were taken to a drafty, nondescript farmhouse in rural Iowa where they were meticulously sorted, cataloged, and shelved with the care of the institutions he did not believe in.

Upstairs, nine rooms were fitted with plain pine shelves, rising eleven tiers high, filling up the thirteen-foot ceilings. It was a house divided into subjects and territories: a California room, an architecture room, a sorting room, a place for periodicals and photographic portfolios, and even a repair room.

His books weren’t prisoners. They were visitors on interlibrary loan. His words.

Blumberg built his own catalog system and committed it to memory. Everything had its place. Incunabula by year. Americana by region. Smaller collections nested within larger ones. “I could put my hands on anything I wanted, instantly,” he said.

When the FBI finally descended on the Iowa house, they found themselves in unfamiliar territory. Agents steeled by gunfire, narcotics raids, and forced entry were confronted with something far more disorienting: a quiet, orderly, museum-quality reading room.

They sent for Glen Dawson, a rare book dealer and appraiser, to assess the scope of the crime. His conclusion was simple: an “excellent collection of Americana.”

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Please Mind the Gap

Stealing a book rarely looks like theft. There’s no violence. No broken glass. No sprinting footsteps or shouted alarms. It is a quiet crime, committed at arm’s length, often by someone who appears to belong in the stacks.

The world does not end, the shelf merely develops a gap. A rearrangement of ownership so subtle it barely registers. The book hasn’t been destroyed, or even damaged. It’s simply been relocated. The shelf doesn’t notice. Neither did the libraries.

When the FBI began making inquiries, “Every institution we called, without exception,” one agent noted, “either had no idea what they lost, or didn’t understand the extent of their losses.”

Books keep secrets. People don’t.

Blumberg was eventually turned in by Kenneth Rhodes, a sometime accomplice with open access to the collection, who scratched out a living selling stolen doorknobs, antiques, and light fixtures. Not a bibliophile.

They're Never Yours

Institutions own books the way a landlord owns an apartment complex: by deed, by debt, and by distance. They catalog them, house them, restrict access to them, occasionally lose them to budget cuts or water damage or simple bureaucratic indifference.

When Paullus’s legions returned from the slaughter at Pydna, they brought the usual spoils—gold, slaves, the wreckage of a defeated kingdom—but they also brought the Library of Perseus. The general was convinced the scrolls were worth preservation, not plunder. Sulla did the same after sacking Athens. Lucullus after breaking Mithridates.

The biblioklept is a Roman.

Blumberg’s impulse was the same, only more intimate. A collection acquired slowly and deliberately, not wholesale. He knew his books: their conditions, their provenance, their peculiarities. He knew each by name. But intimacy is not a defense. I looked it up.

He was arrested, charged, and sentenced like any other thief. The law recognizes possession, not obsession.

The books returned to their proper shelves, legally accounted for, correctly catalogued, and filed back into the Dewey Decimal System.

The gap closed. Nobody noticed that either.

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Dig Deeper:

• A Gentle Madness — Oak Knoll Press

• Notes on Bibliokleptomania — Internet Archive

• J. Stephen Huntsberry on the Blumberg theft. — YouTube

The Bibliophile: Everything you love about books — except the reviews.

It’s the year 2378, and your descendants—so far removed they mispronounce your surname—are rummaging through a storage locker on Moon Colony 13. Inside a dusty box they find what’s left of you: a concert wristband, a cracked mug you swore you’d fix (before coffee was outlawed during the Caffeine Wars), a handwritten grocery list, and other sentimental debris.

“Whoa,” one of them gasps, “an iPhone 16.”

“Yeah,” says another, “this thing would be worth a fortune—if only they’d kept the box.”

They all nod, slowly, like historians who have discovered that an otherwise sophisticated civilization invented the wheel but used it as a decorative hat.

Which brings us to the dust jacket.

Designed to Disappear

The earliest dust jackets weren’t designed to be admired. In fact, they weren’t designed at all.

They were simply wrapping. Plain paper slipped over cloth-bound books to keep them from getting scuffed in transit.

In ABC for Book Collectors, John Carter describes these early jackets as “ephemera in the most literal sense.” Something meant to be removed and thrown away before the book was even opened.

The book was the object, the binding the art. And the jacket was the paper napkin under the pastry.

Everyone who touched it was complicit in its demise.

Booksellers peeled jackets off so the bindings would show better in window displays. Libraries removed them because they interfered with cataloging and circulation. Readers stripped them because they crinkled, slipped, and generally behaved like they resented being touched.

If a dust jacket survived the 19th century, it did so because someone was lazy, neurotic, or a hoarding pioneer.

Yet, despite entering the world as doomed detritus, the dust jacket got an unlikely reprieve.

The oldest known dust jacket dates to 1829 and originally wrapped a gift book titled Friendship’s Offering. It survives today in the Bodleian Library, complete with traces of sealing wax and printed notices advertising the book as “elegantly bound.”

Art, Marketing, and the Collector as Savior

By the early twentieth century, the dust jacket shifted from protection to persuasion as publishers discovered it could help sell a book.

Illustration replaced plain paper and typography became expressive. The jacket became the first impression, setting the mood, making a promise from across the bookstore.

Certain visual styles became recognizable at a glance: the sharp geometric patterns of the 1920s, the painterly author portraits of midcentury literary fiction, the minimal modern jackets from Knopf. One could sometimes identify the publisher, even the era, without opening the book.

The dust jacket was no longer an afterthought; it was the reason you picked up the book.

Then something unexpected happened.

Once readers started looking forward to new dust jackets, collectors started looking backward for the ones that were missing.

Most were gone. But those that weren’t made some books worth a fortune.

Consider The Great Gatsby. When it was published in 1925, the first edition jacket featured artwork by Francis Cugat, a surreal, haunting image of celestial eyes overlooking a carnival. The jacket was striking. It was also paper.

Most people removed it. A few kept it, folded carefully in a drawer or pressed flat in the book itself, but they were the exception.

The book became a classic. The first edition became valuable. And the jacket became the difference between a collectible and a fortune.

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A first edition of Gatsby without its jacket might reach the high five-figure range. But with the jacket intact, that number jumps into the hundreds of thousands.

This wasn’t unique to Fitzgerald. Across the rare book market, the same pattern emerged: jackets that survived became the primary determinant of value. The jacket condition often mattered more than the condition of the book itself.

The Protective Wrapper Gets a Wrapper

Walk into a serious bibliophile’s home today and you’ll witness a magnificent inversion of purpose.

Dust jackets encased in archival Mylar sleeves. Crystal-clear protective wrappers for the protective wrapper. Some go even further, adding acid-free backing boards to prevent the jacket from bending or custom-fitted boxes to shield the sleeved jacket.

Book collectors have developed a vocabulary of jacket conditions that would make a gemologist blush: “price-clipped,” “sunned at spine,” “short closed tear,” “minor chipping at extremities.” A difference of millimeters in jacket damage could mean a difference of thousands in value.

Booksellers photograph jackets from multiple angles—front, back, spine, flaps—and note every flaw in prose that approaches the confessional. “Minor wear at crown of spine. Small dampstain on rear panel, not affecting any text.”

Libraries that once stripped jackets now have special collections devoted to preserving them. Archivists wear gloves to handle them. Conservation specialists repair tears with Japanese tissue and wheat paste with the same reverence once reserved for illuminated manuscripts.

The Book Industry Study Group even created a standardized grading system.

The jacket has become the book’s resume, its insurance policy, its authentication document. A book in fine condition with a poor jacket is damaged goods. A poor book with a fine jacket is “salvageable.”

They Thought It Was Trash. We Disagreed.

There’s something inevitable about the dust jacket’s journey.

It entered the world as an afterthought—utilitarian, unglamorous, designed to be discarded the moment it finished its job. Nobody imagined it would matter. Nobody planned for its preservation. It survived, and when it did, it was by accident.

And yet of all the parts of the book, it’s now the one we handle with the most care.

But perhaps that isn’t odd at all.

When the rest of the world was tossing dust jackets in the bin, our bibliophilic predecessors were doing what came naturally.

Because bibliophiles don’t just love books—they love everything books touch, everything that touches books, and everything that once touched something that touched books.

The string from the package. The bookseller’s invoice. The original mailing envelope. The bookmark left inside by a previous owner.

We notice the endpapers, the printer’s device, the kerning on the spine. We save ticket stubs from author signings and obsess over the feel of laid paper. We’re sentimental archivists of the marginal and the peripheral.

Where normal people see a book, we see an archaeological site.

The dust jacket survived because bibliophiles have always cared about the things around a book as much as what’s inside it.

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Dig Deeper:

• Four of the Earliest (and Most Remarkable) Publisher’s Dust Jackets — ILAB

• A Guide to Identifying The Great Gatsby First Editions — Sotheby’s

• 32 Beautiful Early Dust Jackets for Iconic Books — Literary Hub

• ABC for Book Collectors — Oak Knoll Publishing

The Bibliophile: Everything you love about books — except the reviews.

Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern spent sixty years together in an Upper East Side apartment surrounded by books, which is precisely the sort of detail that makes people go misty-eyed and stupid.

Read any of their mainstream profiles and you’ll find the same highlights in the same order. They ran one of America’s premier antiquarian book businesses. They discovered that Louisa May Alcott wrote sensation fiction under a pseudonym. They broke barriers in a field dominated by men. They had dachshunds—dachshunds, for God’s sake.

There will also be the standard we’re-not-interested-but-will-mention-it-anyway allusions to the possibly sapphic nature of their relationship. So that we can dispense with it here and get to what matters: they said they weren’t, common sense says they were, and the curiosity tells us far more about the curious than the women themselves.

Anatomy of Intuition

What’s missing from most accounts of Rostenberg and Stern’s legacy requires a German word, which tells you something. The Germans excel at two things: making the twentieth century considerably worse than it needed to be, and inventing compound nouns that express what the rest of us are too inarticulate to say.

Schadenfreude. Gemütlichkeit. Fingerspitzengefühl. It’s that last one we need.

Intimidating on the page, a glottal train wreck in the throat, it is a characteristically Teutonic construction that sounds like someone dropping a drawer of cutlery but describes something as sublime as a heartbeat.

Fingerspitzengefühl: fingertip feeling. The intuition that lives in the hands, not the head.

Rostenberg and Stern could authenticate a sixteenth-century binding by touch. Date paper by weight. Identify a modern forgery by the way ink sat on the page—not read, sat. Their fingers were instruments calibrated over decades of handling tens of thousands of volumes until variations became as legible as text. Their fingers read.

They described it as “a tingling of the fingertips” that became “an electrical current of suspense, excitement, recognition.” A sensation that occurred while scanning dealer shelves in London, Paris, and across the Continent. An early warning system calibrated by decades of handling books until the hand knew what the eye hadn’t yet confirmed.

The current sparked hundreds of times. Over a slim quarto pamphlet produced in London in 1652, the text and printing supervised by Milton. With a plump notebook bound in vellum, filled with pen and ink sketches. Over a French pamphlet, unbound and ephemeral, reporting the discovery of “Austral Land.”

For over a half century they continued on, handling books no one else could authenticate. They built reputations. They made discoveries. They lived long, grand lives. They died. Leona in 2005. Madeleine in 2007.

From Atoms to Pixels

Outside the immediate, grieving ambit of those who knew and cherished them, nothing catastrophic happened. No libraries burned. The books they authenticated still exist. The texts are online. Access is universal, instantaneous, and democratic.

Madeleine and Leona’s “Milton” now lives on the screen; peered at in Starbucks that smell of burnt-milk-and-detergent steam, studied in the thin blue light of offices that smell of nothing. The efficient, clinical hallmark of progress.

And though technology allows you to zoom in on the scans until the paper fibers look like felled redwoods, the screen will never whisper the tactile secret; the paper is suspiciously, frantically thin—the work of a printer running out of stock while the King was running out of time.

Moving a 1652 quarto from a London basement to a cloud with no nerve endings keeps the lyrics but murders the music.

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Leona and Madeleine knew exactly what was being lost: “What electronic process can reproduce the touch and feel of an incunable Book of Hours, an Aldine quarto, the immediacy of an Elzevier duodecimo designed to fit into the pocket so that he who runs may read... Nothing in cyberspace can convey the character and substance of the original.”

Seduced by Progress

In defending the physical, we’re armed with only the esoteric; whispery, nebulous reasoning that sounds less like logic and more like a séance. It is the shamanic insistence that a specific arrangement of atoms holds a resonance that a digital image cannot mirror. But it doesn’t square the ledger. It doesn’t fit the math of a modern world where accessibility equals progress. By every logical metric, the scan is the victory.

Yet, with the screen triumphant, we still insist on the clutter. The stacks you trip over in the hallway. The volumes unopened for decades. The objectively insane practice of owning multiple versions of our favorite books: first editions, new editions, reading copies, mark-up copies, travel copies, signed copies of course, and, yes, all backed up with the most egregious form of sleeping with the enemy, a digital copy.

And that digital copy? Just a small part of the catalogue in our pocket. 50,000 volumes, portable, indestructible, on demand, served up on devices that the curators of the Great Library of Alexandria would describe as “mechanical oracles” — but we know are just the logical apex of the infotainment age.

We’re told we have a library in our pockets, but we don’t. We have a wealth of data. We have information and glowing, backlit fonts, but we don’t have form. Access without intent. We can hold the data of 50,000 books and still have nothing in our hands but a slab of glass. A Kindle is a filing cabinet, but a book is a guest in the room.

We don’t surround ourselves with books because we are scholars, but because we are human. We don’t touch books to extract their information, assess their market value, or validate their provenance. In the words of Leona and Madeleine, “We touch them because we fucking like to touch them.”

Well, maybe those are my words, but I think they would agree.

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Dig Deeper:

• The “Milton” — The British Library

• Leona & Madeline interviewed on Bookends — C-SPAN

• Old Books, Rare Friends — Penguin Random House

The Bibliophile: Everything you love about books — except the reviews.