The Gutenberg Elegies

The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age  by Sven Birkerts

“Being a curmudgeon is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it,” Birkerts announces and proceeds to beautifully lament the quickening loss of the art of reading in our era of hypertextuality. By mixing memoir, historical narrative, and cultural critique, Birkerts argues by example against cyberspace’s flattening of history, where private memory is being supplanted by public software, vertical depth is overwhelmed by horizontal “links,” and hard-won, historical wisdom is losing ground to the evanescent present of the blinking cursor. While he concedes to certain advantages of a global information system, or scanning the whole of Greek literature into digital files, Birkerts’ brilliant essays remind us that the truly essential, nourishing “networking” exists among a printed text, an active reader, and the deep, ineffable “other” that all great books approach. The enthusiastically proclaimed coming digitalization and online availability of nearly every book that exists lends increased relevance to this prescient book, first published over two decades ago (1994), well before the popularization of e-books.

272 pp. paper $16.00