Last winter, hit by the exceptionally low temperatures, our central heating broke down, our pipes froze, and late on Hogmanay we had two bursts, one above the kitchen, and one above the library.  We were lucky. Unlike many others that night, we were not out revelling, and so we got the water turned off before too much damage was done.  But this did mean that our first foot was the emergency plumber!

Fortunately, the insurance came through, and so we could finally get round to decorating the library, the paintwork of which had been untouched since we moved in 12 years ago.  We decided to do the job properly, and also invest in ‘real’ bookshelves to replace the semi-industrial, plastic-coated metal  jobs which I’d first started buying as a student, and which we’d gradually added to, from house to house, as our book-buying proceeded unchecked over the years.

So I’ve spent much of my leisure time in the past few weeks assembling large amounts of Ikea furniture—an oddly satisfying experience which must have something to do with a shared Nordic psyché. And now comes the extremely rewarding process of putting the books back in their proper order: subject matter, alphabetical, chronological, geographic—whichever system suits.  No Dewey decimal here, I’m afraid.

This has of course got me looking again at books which, for many years now, have not done much more than, as Virginia Woolf put it, ‘furnished a room’.  Some we’ve been brave about, and sent off to the second hand bookshops and charity shops (and some were so clearly of no value that we just sent them to be pulped!).  But most, battered, foxed and stained though they may be (for most were bought second hand to begin with), have gone back up on the pristine new shelves.

And so I have to ask myself, why?  Why hang on to loads of novels that we probably won’t read again; or text books from university days; or reference books whose subject matter can be found instantly (and more up to date ) on the Internet? Why, indeed, spend a small fortune (even at Ikea prices) on reshelving them all?  The ‘Life Laundry’ team would be much more ruthless!

The answer, of course, is irrational. We like to know they’re there.  We like to reach out for them when we want to, or even just let our gaze roam over them.  We like to think of them, as if they were housed in Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University, muttering to each other in the dark. We value the feeling that something of the mind and personality of the author, from Montaigne to Richard Dawkins, from John Donne to Dorothy Dunnett, is residing with us.

Is this attitude of mind—which I’m sure is not untypical—dying out? Will future generations be happy with virtual books and e-readers, as already the current younger generation seems happy to dispense with anything as tangible as a CD? Will they even read books at all, in any form, or will they, as my colleague Peter thinks, just assemble their own collections of texts from the virtual library, as they currently assemble playlists of ‘songs’?  

This is not just a question of one technology driving out another.  Printing, for better or worse, destroyed an oral tradition that went back to the ages of Homer and Gilgamesh. It, quite literally, changed the way our minds worked.  In living memory, the founding of Penguin and the introduction of the cheap paperback edition changed our way of using books, and it became possible for even those of modest means to build up huge libraries that would have been the envy of their counterparts even in Victorian times.

On those rare occasions when someone gives me a book token as a present, I’ll go into Waterstones or Borders and find myself mentally paralysed by choice.  I much prefer coming across a book that intrigues me in a small bookshop like the many excellent independent ventures dotted across the Highlands, or even finding the one item of interest in a sea of mediocre airport fodder in a charity shop.   If all books—in and out of print—are readily available on line, as most music now is, will future readers build the strong allegiances and deep loves that have so enriched my own life?

There’s one odd factor that gives me some hope.  Books are getting longer.  Novels, biographies, histories and travel books are almost all much longer than their equivalents of twenty-odd years ago.  In terms of writers who produce series of novels, like those in the crime and SF genres, you can actually plot the moment when the expansion began, in, for example, John le Carré, PD James, or Reginald Hill.  In Isaac Asimov’s continuation of his seminal ‘Foundation trilogy’, published some thirty years after the first series, each novel is almost as long as the whole of the original trilogy. Neal Stephenson’s truly wonderful ‘Baroque Trilogy’ weighs in at nearly 3,000 pages, and is officially the longest modern novel written in long hand.

Biographies of writers regularly run to two volumes.  John Richardson’s biography of Picasso has just reached its third instalment, with at least one more to come, if he’s spared.  Norman Davies’ two mind-changing histories ‘The Isles’ and ‘Europe’ both pass the 1,000 pages mark. Now, bigger is not always better (certainly not in the case of some of the novelists cited above!) but it does suggest that there are a lot of people prepared to commit the time to read these behemoths.  And of course the ne plus ultra is the Harry Potter series, without doubt the longest books ever written for young people (at least until Stephanie Meyer’s ‘Twilight’ vampire series came along). 

So maybe I shouldn’t be pessimistic.  It looks like the concept of the book, whether physical or virtual, is going to be around for a while yet, and readers will probably still want to ‘own’ books--at least so long as Ikea and their like supply affordable shelves to stack them on!