Fists of Time

Boston and Books

I am in Boston on business this week and the only sightseeing that I planned was to visit some book stores.  I recall getting a tour of Cambridge from some friends many years ago and marveling at the number of book stores there.  The preponderence seemed natural for the home of Harvard University.  As the years have gone by, though, local book stores in my area have dwindled and died.  That has only enhanced the aura that surrounded the Cambridge stores I'd walked past.  I've already seen the Freedom Trail, Bunker Hill, and other area landmarks.  What I wanted to do this week was some book shopping.

First stop was Raven Used Books.  This store has three solid book shelves on U.S. history, including subsections on Native American, colonial, and African-American history.  A separate bookshelf is filled with biographies, autobiographies and memoirs of cultural figures like Alfred Kazin, or Anthony Burgess's book on D.H. Lawrence.  Especially impressive is Raven's large sections on world history and political science.

Personally, I picked up two books that I have already read but did not own.  Taylor Branch's Parting The Waters is a seminal narrative history of the civil rights movement in the 1950s leading up to the 1963 March on Washington.  (Nominally a 'biography' of Martin Luther King, Jr., this work actually provides a panorama of civil right activism at the time.  After reading James Patterson's Great Expectations this month, I was suprised at how much Patterson relied on Branch's accounts of civil rights battles.)  Merton Dillon's 1966 biography of Benjamin Lundy was a true gem, and worth every effort to visit Cambridge.  Unlike Parting the Waters, this work is out of print and is the only biography of Lundy to appear in the last 150 or so years.  As I wrote last month, Lundy was the subject of some research of mine, and maybe this purchase will prompt me to try to write about Lundy for a popular local audience.

After a stop for the kids at the Curious George store, which has a small but impressive selection of children's books, the next stop on my stroll down Massachusetts Avenue was Harvard Book Store.  Harvard features new and used books.  New books are on the ground floor; while searching for the staircase, I couldn't help but appreciate the impressive selection of new hardbacks, ranging from new academic releases to mysteries and other genre niches.  (I also tried not to disturb the book reading in progress.)  The downstairs used book selection was massive, especially their fiction section, which comprised at least one dozen shelving units.  Like at Raven, I was a little disappointed at the overall selection of U.S. history choices but very impressed at the entire used selection.  I selected David Halberstalm's The Fifties, which should follow Great Expectations rather well.

From Harvard Book Store, I expected a long walk to Central Square, where I stopped for dinner.  On the way back to the Central MBTA stop, though, I couldn't help but notice another used book store.  Unfortunately, Rodney's Book Store was just closing.  Nonetheless, their selection, including an entire subsection on U.S. presidents, and even a sub-sub-section on the Kennedy family, was also impressive.  I'll have to spend more time there on my next visit.

I'm coming back from this experience with ambivalence.  Scrounging for books in the days of dwindling print media, I feel like I'm in a Mad Max movie, hoarding fuel in the wake of apocalypse.  Shouldn't everyone have access to Merton Dillon's biography of Benjamin Lundy?  Of course, that brings up so many other questions, like cultural literacy, the viability of e-books, and the actual availability and cost of e-books.  (See recent blogging by Mike O'Mally and Jon Fea on the latter questions.)  Am I actually hurting the cause of publishing by buying used books, or am I keeping the flame of literacy burning?  I don't have the answer but I can't deny that tonight's book shopping was a fun ride.

While You Were Protesting SOPA...

As prominent websites blacked out to protest SOPA on January 18, the Supreme Court of the United States delivered a landmark ruling to corporate copyright owners.  As media attention remained focused on the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, the Court handed down its opinion in Golan v. Holder.

This timing was, ironically, advantageous for the entertainment industry.  While open access advocates such as website Boing Boing passionately condemn SOPA/PIPA, little attention was paid to the ruling in Golan.  Boing Boing, for example, had several posts on Golan as it headed to oral argument, but none in the wake of its ruling.  Similarly, Lawrence Lessig's twitter feed lit up against SOPA in December and January, but did not address the 6-2 court ruling.  The same goes for UPenn Cinema Studies professor Peter Decherney, who had written an amicus brief in the case and a New York Times op-ed on Golan in October, but has not spoken out prominently about the case's outcome.

Unlike legislation that has drastically enhanced copyright protection (i.e. the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), Golan has limited scope.  It pertains only to older works whose copyright status remain murky due to age and gaps in international law.  As the Conductors Guild famously argued in its amicus brief, an unfavorable ruling would mean that "student ensemble[s] no longer can perform Prokofiev’s [1936 composition] Peter and the Wolf or Stravinsky’s [1918 composition] Soldier’s Tale, among other titles."  While technically the ruling has limited implications, it enforces a trend toward unreasonable copyright extension and has educational implications beyond those of youth music ensembles.

Anyone interested in studying history should be concerned about this ruling.  Golan further restricts the amount of modern media that may be consumed, and studied, free of charge.  Imagine if we could view a vast library of early Twentieth-Century film online, without ads.  The educational value would be immense.  Sites like the Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons, which currently house invaluable resources to historical researchers, are now threatened because they provide unlicensed versions of retroactively copyrighted content.  Unfortunately, the majority of the Supreme Court believes that corporations and the estates of long-deceased artists are more important than scholars who might use these types of resources.

The Golan ruling and SOPA represent a double threat to web-savvy historians and internet archives.  If SOPA were to pass, a site containing unlicensed, retroactively copyrighted content could be taken offline immediately without any due process.  The federal government itself might have to shut down its own websites.  This could conceivably happen if Time complained that the Smithsonian history blog Past Imperfect used items from their photo archive without permission, or if a major film studio that produced a video for the government found out that clips made their way into the National Archives Archival Research Catalog.

A ruling in favor of copyright holders does not mean that open access advocates should be resigned to failure.  The Court's right wing often defers (rhetorically, at least) to the authority of Congress.  Should our legislators actually follow the spirit of our Constitution - which offered copyright protection for "limited times," not lifetimes - they may reverse the trend towards copyright extension and begin to limit the unreasonable amount of time that copyrighted material is locked away for the benefit of corporations.

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(Note: while the actual opinion should be available at the Supreme Court website here (.pdf), it is currently unavailable - perhaps, if I might speculate, because of hacker interference?)

Justifying the Need for Public Domain Re-Prints

The Washington Post published a review of a new Penguin edition of Ernest Poole's novel The Harbor (1915) this weekend.  I enjoyed learning about Poole and this forgotten book.  (A portrait of early 20th-Century working-class Brooklyn, the book is described favorably compared to other social realist works of the era; Poole won the first Pulitzer Prize for his next novel.)  What I missed, however, was any discussion of the value that Penguin might have added to the book.  Because The Harbor is now in the public domain, why should E-Book users even bother buying Penguin's version?  Project Gutenberg has a public domain version available here.  (Google Books offers a version here.)

Sure, many re-printed classics include essays and forewards, but these are typically dry and unappealing to the casual reader.  What, besides a soft binding, makes Penguin's version any better than the free online version?

I, personally, am not an e-book user and would probably be inclined to read Penguin's version instead.  It is undeniable, though, that e-book demand is surging.  In this context, re-packaging a public domain text seems pointless.

The Post claims that Penguin has "rescued [The Harbor] from oblivion," but, thanks to Project Gutenberg and open access advocates had already preserved the work for posterity.

JSTOR and Free Access

JSTOR has now enabled all public users to access all content prior to 1923 for free.  That may be a small, theoretical victory for open access, but will such archaic material actually be useful to anybody?

It is difficult to discuss this news without considering JSTOR's unpopularity.  Many people consider the paywall-based site a "gatekeeper" withholding free information from a deserving public.  (A Google search for "JSTOR hack" displays a surprising number of hits.)  This has culminated recently in hacktivist Aaron Swartz's recent raid.  Personally, I don't hold anything against JSTOR.  If anyone is to blame, it is the Journals themselves.  JSTOR is just an enterprising company that takes advantage an opportunity for licensing and aggregation, and countless students have benefited from it.

Still, I cynically consider the timing of this announcement, in light of the recent news of Aaron Swartz's prosecution.  There may be no direct connection; after all, the legal and technical challenges to implementing the new policy could have taken months.  Nonetheless, the policy is likely a response to the same type of criticism that people like Swartz make.

To me, the more interesting question is whether or not any of this pre-1923 content is actually useful.  I can't imagine exactly what type of research would benefit from this.  Obviously, you can perform some historiography, but that is not very useful if you can only see older research and not compare it with something from the mid-20th Century.  If you are using journals that are this old, then you are probably already affiliated with an academic institution and the paywall is not a problem for you.

Keeping America Informed: History of the GPO on Exhibit

I had the pleasure of visiting the Government Printing Office the other day to see its exhibit
on the agency's 150 years of publishing.  GPO's story directly ties together the Civil War and Progressive Era and even recent historical trends such as education reform and the war against al Qaeda.  (Many of my personal interests are also involved: the District of Columbia, government documents, and publishing.)  This history is illustrated through excellent artifacts, original GPO publications, and a photograph collection that vividly depictions the social and technological changes over two centuries.

Government Printing Office historian George Barnum provided a guided tour - available to the public at request (see details below).  Barnum is fluent in the academic questions involved in the social, political, and technological aspects of GPO's evolution.  As a printing shop, it began with a rigid division of labor that allowed women jobs sewing bindings.  Employee clubs and organizations sprang up as managers embraced Taylorite scientific management.  Production vastly increased with innovations in typesetting. This productivity allowed Progressive Era agencies to print public health pamphlets and wage war in Europe.  These themes come across in the self-guided exhibit too, and are expressed with subtle, accessible style.

Perhaps the best lesson of all came from a GPO employee - Norris, a 50+ year veteran, a former typesetter who proofreads Congress's daily output on the night shift - who tagged along on the tour.  Norris pointed out the quirks of old printer keys and other minutiae.  He enjoyed reminiscing throughout the tour; I think that it did justice to his experiences.

GPO has also published a sleek companion book to the exhibit; visitors receive a 25% discount off of the listed price.

This fall, consider skipping the same old monuments and Smithsonian museums and learn about this relatively unsung government agency.

Keeping America Informed is open 8:00am to 4:00pm, Monday through Friday, at 732 North Capitol Street NW in Washington, D.C.  The exhibit is free.  Request a guided tour through historian George Barnum at (202) 512-1991, or gbarnum@gpo.gov.