Microcosmus Hypochondriacus

curiosities about early modern medicine and history

A Remarkable Instrument: the Printed Book. A Reminder

Emerging from piles of digital articles, reading about digital corporations of all sorts, marvelling at ambitious national digitization projects with exotic names, I was lucky to find a very funny, sincere and touching essay on "how simple, how beautiful in concept, how smart and functional, how versatile the book page" really is. 

In a few paragraphs written for an e-diary which unfortunately has not been updated since 2007, Cécile Alduy* reminds us that there is nothing compared to the simple pleasure of randomly opening a book, turning its pages, reading it in broad daylight (well, Amazon likes to think that their new Kindle, as opposed to the iPad, can be extensively used while sunbathing poolside) :

plaisir de feuilleter, d'ouvrir le livre au hasard, de revenir sur ses pas, de faire tourner les pages avec le pouce sur la tranche comme un jeu de cartes à battre, de commencer par la fin, d'écrire dessus, entre les lignes, sur les mots, dans les marges, de récrire sur ces marginalia, de corner les pages, de les déchirer, de coller de marques pages et autres stickers de couleur.
De lire dans son bain, au soleil, debout dans le métro, dans un café, un avion, un bus, la cuisine, un parc, la forêt, la chambre (et ailleurs). (full text available here)

And my favourite line:

Le livre est poli: jamais il ne vous lancerait: "has unexpectedly quit."

The book is indeed more polite than any browser, it never freezes, dies or disappears; nor does it suddenly become auto-ironic. Something which is happening a lot to the Google Chrome browser. What follows is rather off-topic, but quite funny...

A few hours ago, I got suddenly disconnected from the Internet, so when I tried access the google.com page, I was shown the following text by the Google Chrome browser: 

This webpage is not available.
The webpage at http://www.google.com/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.

In a way, this implies that Google Chrome can never encounter any problems, and the careful wording of the error message moves the attention away from what might be a browser problem. While this might work for any other website (Google has enough authority to tell us when a website's gone, moved permanently, closed the business, unexpectedly quit, or disappeared mysteriously in the binary fog), it does sound a lot like involuntary humour when Chrome displays such a text in relation to their own website... Google has left the building.

 

*Cécile Alduy is assistant professor of French at Stanford and the creator of the Renaissance Body Project. The essay quoted above is part of the "Studio" – the "informal" part of the project, containing, apart from this e-diary, an unexpected Youtube video about which I am currently writing a post.

 

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