Unintended consequences....

Technology, the bane of the collector. As we pine and angst about the changes web technology has wrought upon the fine and noble art of book dealing, perhaps a bit of perspective is in order. A.S.W. Rosenbach wrote, in his auto-biographical collection of tales and musings, Books and Bidders:

"The typewriter - what a curse it has become to the collector! A century from now it will be almost impossible to find the original autograph manuscripts of writers of to-day who stand the test of time. Who knows but that the styles will have changed, and the machine upon which a masterpiece was brought to life will be considered even more precious!"

This was in 1926. He was right and wrong. It took far less than a century to make it all but impossible to find original autograph manuscripts. What he could not have foreseen is that today, we do not even have the "original typewritten manuscript." Virtually everything is produced and edited in word processors and often transmitted to the publisher in digital form. The printed manuscript itself is all but lost.

The greater loss, I think, is that of a view into the process of creating great works. If you look at the manuscript of Joyce's, Ulysses you can *see* the process he went through to get the finished work where he wanted. Twain's manuscripts are wonderful to look at for the amount of changes and tweaking he applied. I've a lovely copy of Sylvia Beach's manuscript for, Shakespeare and Company (auto-biographical tale of the Left Bank publishing house that printed, among others, Ulysses)...what sets this proof apart is that it contains marginalia and edits from the pen of James Johnson Sweeney (Beach's friend and curator of the Guggenheim).

Today, Sweeney's notations would be a "Track Changes" function of MS Word. Perhaps, one day, a disk with various iterations of a given volume will be much sought after...I doubt it. It does seen a shame that so much of the "process" of creating a major work appears have been lost as a "capturable" thing...less for the collection world than that of scholarship. How a great work came into being is, for many, as significant as the end product itself. I fear we may be sweeping away the heart of literary creation as easily as we wipe a hard drive before disposing of an old computer.