First off, wow what a campus. According to the Columbia website, Butler currently has over 2 million books just in the stacks, and many more in several auxiliary libraries such as the Business and Dramatic libraries within the same building. The building’s construction was paid for by Standard Oil during the Great Depression, and the architect was the same who designed Yale’s library. Look at how gorgeous it is:

Dr. Stauffer’s hunt for old marginalia really intrigued me, and if I wasn’t completely convinced by the time I got to the Morningside campus, the examples he presented did the job. The class collectively went up to the stacks and began perusing old books (pre-1923) and searching for any annotations that appeared to be made by the original owners. Albeit looking through some 80 books, including very old Peter Pan prints and many decrepit ones in boxes that fell apart when I touched them, I yielded no results. Each time I’d find something written in the margins or underlined, it quickly became apparent that it was much more recent than what Dr. Stauffer was looking for.

Aside from my failure that day, I think the Book Traces project is a very important one. As the world’s population continues to expand and our collective knowledge as well, it is understandable that space begins to become an issue due to newly printed books. While Butler Library truly is huge, unfortunately, it isn’t infinite. For the most part, digitalization is a good solution; almost everyone has portable computers or e-readers, and therefore we can save all of these texts in online hard drives accessible to all. Critics argue that the feeling of holding a book is irreplicable and that e-books aren’t as engaging. Instead of arguing a subjective point such as that one in order to save the books, Dr. Stauffer takes a more ingenious tack and presents the case that the marginalia in these old texts is often just as valuable as the text itself. We can study the annotations and comments by these ghosts of the past in order to further our understanding and insights about the text. These old texts are living and breathing organisms, not just because they were crafted by trees, but because of the stories that reside within them; a prime example being the love story presented to us on the title page of an old book.

While the sadness that comes along with discarding and rendering these books unaccessible is inevitable, I think there are other solutions. In the same way that new technology plays a large part in the downfall of these texts, it can help save them as well. It would be a tedious task, but just as we can have interactive comments in Google word docs, we could collectively input this marginalia (or at least the more important/intriguing portion of it) into the e-versions of the texts. Additionally we could preserve a part of these old collections according to which were used the most. That way, students and alumni could still access history hands-on for a part of their research, and still find everything else online. I wish I’d found something of value in my search, but the experience of digging through the stacks and seeing what my peers around me found was amazing. I’ve always been a bit wary of these dungeon-like rows and rows of books but our interaction with the library changed the way I viewed it. As technology continues to evolve, we will continue to find better and more efficient ways to preserve these texts in their entirety, while still conserving space.