The Problem with English-Language Books

I love you, French philosophers, but make no mistake: the deck is stacked in your favor.

This is a sharp difference from what I’ve posted here before at Lost in the Chaosmos, but those that know me may not be surprised at my topic. I love books, and that love extends from reading them to the art of book-binding and typography. I once was the main typographic editor for a now-defunct grad student journal, Theophron, and lately use my skills for fun and for Wikisource, the free library anyone can improve. My intellectual proclivities, religious affiliation, and my meta-fascination with the book has made a certain problem extremely obvious to me: it is harder to engage with many texts that were written in English and are in the public domain than it is to engage with texts published in other languages.

What I mean is not that it’s somehow harder to read texts in English, or even that it’s strictly harder to access them. In fact, it is much easier: websites like Wikisource, the Internet Archive, or other heaven-sents of the internet make it very easy to access many older English texts. But if one were to download a pdf of, say, Theological Essays by Fredrick Denison Maurice, one would quickly run into a problem. The actual presentation of the text is incredibly dated, the scan of the pages relatively low-fidelity, and the typographic conventions of its age at times distracting. And if you are considerably print-disabled, you are, to put it bluntly, SOL. In contrast, one can, with a little more effort, get translations of a much older text, say, Principles of Philosophy by René Descartes. There are public domain translations into English, but there are also modern English translations with wonderful annotations and clear typographic design cheaply available through series such as Penguin Classics or Oxford World Classics. Far less effort is required to get the words in front of your eyes in the case of older English works, but far more effort is required to actually experience them and delight in them the way one can modern books.

The former luxury is the source of the latter misery: on the one hand, it takes scholarly and typographic effort to get translated scholarly texts to the consumer at all, and on the other, there is a market incentive to do so. If one is putting financial and artistic resources into the publication of a translation of a text, the presentation is bound to be good. If one can then provide information that, strictly speaking, isn’t available elsewhere, then one can financially expect people to buy access to that information. But if a text does not require translation, because it was originally written in English, and is freely available, then there is no good financial reason to invest resources into republishing it and promoting it. Because of these factors, it is more difficult for English speakers to engage with free texts written in our own language.

What can be done about this? To remedy the issue, we have to understand the aesthetic dimensions of reading—the ways that we enjoy reading words on a page and why—and be willing to put the effort to make these texts accessible to modern readers. This is most of the reason why I like to transcribe texts for Wikisource: it’s criminal that some incredibly important texts in the English language are as difficult to access as they are. I have also tried my hand at type design for public domain works, such as the afformentioned Essays by F. D. Maurice. I hope to continue that work in the coming years. Of course, it is difficult work. The gamble we must be willing to take is this: We must be willing to pursue accessibility of these texts apart from market forces as much as we can. The transcription work I am up to can be done by anybody.

This work is happening already, but anybody can join in. I have many Anglican/Episcopal friends and readers, and I imagine that we have felt the problem I’m pointing out most acutely. How many of us have actually read anything by Thomas Cranmer, other than the Book of Common Prayer? But imagine if the works of Cranmer and other Anglican Divines were as accessible to us in as modern form as, say, the King James Bible. That’s the vision I want to promote and manifest.

So, if nothing else, try and set your eyes on the problem: we are all victim to market forces beyond our control. If you want to do something about, try transcribing a text for Wikisource, or let me know what kind of things you would want to see. Maybe I’ll get on to it once I’ve transcribed enough of the works of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. Maybe I will take that transcription and make a modern book out of it. I’ve always wanted to do that anyways.