I arrived a little early to the Great Mosque of San‘a’ in Yemen to continue my research in the small upstairs room which was the “Western Library.” I sat down in a corner waiting for Qadi al-Sharafi to arrive and open the door. All of a sudden a crazed individual, thinking I was a tourist, started shouting at me. I tried to calm him down but immediately others came to my rescue, explaining that I was a researcher studying manuscripts in the library and should not be bothered. When the Qadi arrived, I followed him upstairs, asked for the manuscript I was working on (which was stored in another room) and spent the day sharing a table with a man reciting Quran and another man reading another manuscript. The Qadi was hard of hearing, so when the phone would ring, it was a comedy routine in Arabic of “what did you say?”. This day is forever stored in my pleasant memory department.
Over the past four decades I have spent many hours in libraries, as an undergraduate browsing little-read, dust-covered books on biblical archaeology at Wheaton College, a graduate student browsing the well-stocked stacks at the University of Pennsylvania, requesting rare 19th century Arabic texts in the Oriental Studies room of the New York Public Library, being served tea while reading manuscripts in the Egyptian National Library (Dar al-Kutub), in awe at the one-of-a-kind Bodleian in Oxford, enjoying the lakeside view from the library of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, being amazed at the private library on the Arabian Peninsula of a shaykh in Qatar, to name only the obvious.
I love libraries, because I love books and I love manuscripts. Of course, I read for information, the goal of research. However, this feeling of love is nurtured by actually touching the hardness of a book, absorbing the aroma of yellowed paper or gazing at the original ink or fading print. The book in hand is no less both subject and object than the libraries where they have a home. My age betrays me; my joy is for the bibliophilic memories but my lament is for the current explosion of the pdfs, the Profoundly Dull Facsimiles, that have transformed the research environment. Yes, I know that the pdf is an amazing gift for anyone who works on old books and ancient manuscripts. Blessed be archive.org and its cyber siblings. A digital copy is definitely a “helpmeet” in the tired old biblical sense, but it is still a lifeless robot beside the paper-and-ink flesh of the original.
In 1981 on my way home from a consulting assignment in Egypt, I carried a rapidly purchased suitcase of dubious quality from the Cairo suq full of the hefty 9-volume set of the mother of all Arabic dictionaries, the Taj al-‘Arus of al-Zabidi. This was the 1306/1889 Egyptian version without vowels. For someone just finishing up a dissertation this was a century-old godsend. The suitcase was so heavy that I gave the airport porter extra bakshish. Somehow it made the weight limit on TWA and I arrived with the precious volumes intact at JFK. As I was lugging the suitcase through the doorway into our home, the suitcase exploded and the volumes poured out on the floor, like an offering to the guardians of the house. I now have downloaded the far superior Kuwait edition of the dictionary in pdf and my revered copy, well thumbed over several decades, catches the inevitable dust-off of no longer being useful. Even the pdf has been superseded by an online searchable site of al-Zabidi and several other major Arabic lexicons, including the archaic-yet-eternal Arabic/English lexicon of Edward Lane (http://arabiclexicon.hawramani.com/).
My own library, especially of Arabic books, was built up over several decades. Every trip I made to the Middle East involved checking out bookstores for interesting books in Arabic. Several of the books I purchased, perhaps most, are now available somewhere on the web in pdf and a few are even searchable online. As I look to downsize the far-too-many books that have accumulated, I do appreciate that I can still have access to the information without having to find space for the physical volumes. Like all researchers these days, I have access through pdfs of books and manuscripts I never knew existed or would only find in the storage recess of a major university library, if there. My lament is not for the benefit of progress, just as I would not turn in my Acura TSX for the horse and buggy my grandparents rode more than a century ago. My memories of books, libraries and bookstores are well embedded inside me; any sadness I feel is for those who may not have or take the opportunity to engage with books face-to-face in a space that no digital version can replace.
This is not an obituary. Libraries, especially those useful for scholars of all stripes, are not going to disappear in the near future. There are books upon books in the market and many more coming into print every year. Johannes Gutenberg need not roll over in his grave, although I suspect this 15th century inventor might turn sommersaults over the website named for him (https://www.gutenberg.org/). The lament is not that you cannot share what I have experienced, but that you actually do not have to; but you should.
