Lots of dark wood, tall ceilings, book shelves that require a ladder on a track to reach the top shelf, a desk with one of those desk calenders, some kind of expensive pen, and a ping pong table. This is where I see myself in the prime of my professional life. I don't need too big a home, but I sure would like to help build it with my own two hands, and that one room is all I really care about. When I read consumer reports and look at trends in the economy, with particular focus on Ipads and Kindles, my personal library/study/ping pong room seems a little old-fashioned and frankly kind of obnoxious. I still want it though, and maybe it's self-aggrandizing, or maybe I'm just looking for a more personal experience with my books, one that allows me to organize them in some auto-biographical manner that nobody else gets. Can't a guy have a study? Aren't we all entitled to some sanctuary where the only chaos that exists is the kind we allow?
Maybe not, but I think it's the logical next step to the CD collection I built in college. I'm proud to go through the physical copies of my favorite CDs and I look forward to continue building that collection as well. The truth is however, that the market likes the digital revolution. I was among an interesting group of kids in college who either had the first kind of Ipod or outright rejected them as obnoxious. We screamed cries of "My Ipod..." in the same vein that Milhaus might have screamed about losing his glasses in the Simpsons. I was the latter, my side lost, and now I see the same thing happening to books. Of course not till i started to build a collection of books that far exceeds that of the CDs I had in college. There is a difference now though. I look forward to embracing the Ipad and getting all my books online when it isn't so revolutionary anymore, and I think there are people throughout history who would agree with me. I'll site two figures who I've been studying up on lately.
The first is Benjamin Franklin, a founding father, inventor, the first secretary of state, and a self-made man. The ultimate American. The first American according to UT Austin professor H.W. Brands. A man who probably electrocuted himself a ton back in the day, and a man who made his career as a printer. It was new territory, a transitional period of course, and one with infinite possibilities. Franklin started his career in printing as a young man and was able to use his profession to propel himself to international fame. He was sardonic, witty, and very creative.
One of the products of this side of Franklin was a whole cast of fictional characters with back stories, the characters of course providing social commentary on American culture. Franklin also drew up a political cartoon in the mid 18th century with perhaps the first reference of the American colonies as being autonomous in the press. Ironically, he hoped to remain part of Britain for the majority of his life. He only supported revolution right before it happened. Look up "Join, or Die" and you'll see the image. It's hard to imagine that if Ben Franklin were alive today he would reject the movement of social media, and the accessibility of it in favor of the hard copy which immediately adds a number of costs including production and distribution. I would think Franklin might like to save his money.
Another figure who might have embraced the digital revolution already is the man to whom we owe our economic foundation to, Adam Smith. Some men value gold and some men letters. Of the men of letters, Smith wrote in Wealth of Nations published in 1776, "Before the invention of the art of printing, the only employment by which a man of letters could make anything by his talents, was that of a public or private teacher, or by communicating to other people the curious and useful knowledge which he had acquired himself: And this is still surely a more honourable, a more useful, and in general even a more profitable employment than that other of writing for a bookseller, to which the art of printing has given occasion."
Smith clearly thought printing would open a world of possibilities for these men of letters and would no doubt see opportunity with sites like facebook, twitter, youtube, and he might even have a blog if he were around today. Now that libraries of books and music might render my personal study/library/ping pong room 2/3 irrelevant, I wonder if I might just be happy with an Ipad and a ping pong table. I don't know exactly how the digital revolution is going to effect the future of America, or how the landscape might change because of it, but I remember hearing from my parents when I was a kid how lucky I was to have a school bus to take me to school and that they had to"walk a mile to and from school in a snowstorm". I created my own image of snow shoes and a blizzard that made it hard to see 3 feet ahead, and now I wonder if I'll tell my kids about how "I had to carry a bag full of books all day that weighed almost 40 pounds, so you're lucky to have that Ipad". I probably will when they ask me why I need to build shelves for the study. And I'll probably exaggerate. Give me a break. Can't a guy have a study?
