Link to Watch My TED Talk (and the transcript)
In 2016, I gave a TED Talk about how our bookshelves represent who we are. Preparing for and giving the talk really provided me with an opportunity to reflect on the previous 15 years selling books, and the meaning in all of it.
The video of my TED Talk is below, followed by a transcript of the talk. I hope it resonates with you and gives you a new appreciation of your books and why they’re on your shelves!
The Books We Keep, the Stories We Tell
By Thatcher Wine
“The origin of the printed book dates to the year 1440, when Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type and the printing press and the printed book as we know it was born.
A lot has happened in the ensuing 576 years.
We all know that history is written in books. But history also happens because of books.
Religious reformations, political revolutions, scientific discoveries, all announced or incited by words on the printed page.
And yet, despite all the history written in books and all the history brought on by books, just a few years ago there was serious talk of printed books themselves becoming history.
E-books were supposedly taking over. Their sales were rapidly accelerating and it seemed that the long, successful run of Gutenberg’s invention might be nearing the end of its useful life.
From 2008 to 2012, e-books sold more and more copies and were projected to surpass print book sales by 2017.
Encyclopedia Britannica announced that their 2010 edition would be their last in print. From then on, it was digital access only.
What, after all, is the purpose of this stack of paper with words printed on it when you can get these same words online, whenever and wherever you want?
And then, just a few years ago...things started to level off. Print fought back. It was like a global realization had set in that there’s something kind of valuable in this old technology. That e-books have their use, but they are not a replacement for ALL printed books.
Printed books have always been beautiful, but anyone who has been into a bookstore lately knows how much more impressive they have become in response to their existence being threatened.
It’s as if the books themselves heard the rumors of their impending extinction and developed a biological response -- they made themselves more desirable and attractive.
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Think about a printed book you have at home, your favorite book, or just the first book that pops into your head.
What comes to mind when you think about that book? Is it the plot? A character?
Or is it something about the book’s relationship to you?
If you thought of your favorite Jane Austen or Hemingway novel, perhaps what came to mind was a feeling of holding the book in your hands, a sense of where on the pages a favorite scene or passage was printed, a memory of who you were dating at the time...
Printed books have the power to transport us across time and space.
When I contemplate my favorite books, the first one that comes to mind is The Catcher in the Rye. I was on the 3rd Avenue bus in New York City, 13 years old and reading this exact book -- it looked a little younger back then, and so did I -- heading uptown to school on a rainy fall morning and becoming so engrossed in Holden Caulfield...that I missed my stop.
Now compare this to e-books. If you have read an e-book, think of your favorite book or just one that you consumed on your device...via the cloud.
It’s a little different. Do you recall where you were when you read that book? How the device felt in your hands as you scrolled through the “pages?”
Do you picture where in your list of downloads that book is? Maybe it’s after the Malcolm Gladwell and before that trashy romance novel you downloaded in the middle of the night?
We buy books to read them -- to digest the stories they contain between their covers, to be entertained, to learn something new...
But why, really, do we keep printed books?
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When I look at my own shelves, I am reminded of the stories I fell in love with when I was a kid, the subjects I studied in college, how I moved these books with me from apartment to apartment, house to house, in and out of boxes, off the shelves and onto new ones...
These books are my story. I didn’t write a single one of them. But they are still my story. The story of who I am.
When we add books -- any printed books -- to our homes and lives and make space for them, something magical happens. We combine the author and their story with who we are and our story.
The combination of the author and their story plus us and our story is a new story. And it’s completely original.
Like our DNA, the combination of books we keep cannot be replicated by anyone else. Even if others have the same book titles as us, their books have different meaning to them. By holding books in our hands for hours as we read them, we develop associations that last forever.
Where we were when you bought the books, who we were when you read the books, where we keep our books and how we organize them...The books we keep are so much more than the stories on their pages and the titles on their spines.
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At the end of the day, and the beginning of the day too, we live in a physical world. No matter how much technologists try to convince us we can keep all our stuff in the cloud and digitize our entire existence, this is not The Matrix.
Human beings are not computer code. We live in the real world in buildings and houses -- that is why architecture and design matter. In the real world, we cannot keep unlimited amounts of stuff. We have to make decisions about what is important to us and where it goes.
We make choices about whether to keep a copy of Wuthering Heights or a biography of Winston Churchill, to give away that book about dog breeds that Aunt Alice gave you or to buy a first edition of a beloved classic. These are acts of conscious choice, but also acts of creative expression.
Anyone who sees your library isn’t just seeing the creative output of the authors who wrote the books. They are seeing the story of your life written across your shelves through the books that you keep.
When we decide to keep a book and make space for it on our shelves, it becomes more than just a book. It becomes a placeholder, a breadcrumb, an invitation that we can come back to at any time. Perhaps to re-read it, or just to think about it for a second as we pass by. Or respond to a guest who notices it and asks: “I didn’t know you were interested in Philosophy?”
Walk into a stranger’s home anywhere in the world and want to know something about them, or what to talk about over dinner? Simply look at their bookshelves.
When we merge our books with a partner’s and perhaps add children to the house, our bookshelves and libraries take on new meaning, serving to tell the story not just of one life and where we have been, but that of the entire family and our future.
We could choose to keep other things on our shelves, fossils perhaps... they make nice bookends, actually.
But nothing tells the story of who we are, where we have been, and where we are going like our books. And it’s a story that is never-ending. It can constantly be rewritten, edited, chapters added...simply by changing the books on your shelf.
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The origin of printed books and all the stories they tell can be traced back to Gutenberg and his invention 576 years ago.
Fast-forward to the present and it seems like time is accelerating -- we have less and less of it.
Our focus shifts second by second. We flip through our friends’ updates on Facebook or Instagram quickly to get the story, we get impatient when a song or a movie takes too long to download.
Who has time to read a book? That takes hours.
Who has time to write a book? That takes years.
But when we look up from our phones at our bookshelves, we’re reminded that we once had the time to spend 10 or 20 hours with every one of those books...
When we look up from the movie we’re watching at our shelves, we’re reminded that every one of those books took an author years to write.
We could look at our books and all the time they represent and feel overwhelmed. But we aren’t. Printed books make us feel comfortable and make us feel like everything is going to be okay.
As human beings living in a digital age, time-starved and rushing around, printed books are reminders of the time we once had, the time we want to have, the time we hope to have...
So long as there are words on a page, they will tell a story. And so long as there are printed books on the shelf, they will tell a story. The books we keep are the stories we tell.
It’s easy to take printed books for granted, it’s old technology...but it’s good technology.
Whether the books are in our hands or on our shelves, their covers open or shut, they keep on telling stories.
And so should we.”