Legacy Bookbindery

Gospel of Thomas/Nag Hammadi binding Almost four years ago I was part of a collaborative project that resulted in a remarkable artifact: Binding Beowulf. Well, now I’ve had the honor to again work with the calligrapher and clien…

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OK, that's a very cool project.

Up close and 3D: photogrammetric models at the Bodleian John Barrett (Bodleian Imaging Studio and ARCHiOx Project) introduces the Bodleian’s growing collection of photogrammetric models Explore on: Holy Bible; Psalms, 1660-1661, London. Embroider…

I got a query from a High School student who was working on an essay. It was a good question, and I thought I'd share it and my answer.

Query: "do we need custodians of knowledge?"

Answer: I'm a writer with a modest following (how your dad knows me), and I certainly understand the instinct that people have that writing can extend knowledge, from personal experience to hard-won scholarship which synthesizes different threads of knowledge. I have tried to do that in my writing career.

But I was also a conservator of rare books and documents for 30 years, and in that time I was dedicated to preserving the physical documents which contain knowledge. Today we tend to think that anything we might want to know is readily available online, perhaps with a little searching.

But that isn't true. I have done conservation work on countless one-of-a-kind books/documents which will probably never be scanned, or written about, or shared with the broader world. Does that mean those items are unworthy of protection?

Hardly. It is impossible for us to know what will be important to people in the future. It might be a herbal that someone's grandmother wrote that winds up containing a description of a plant that can cure some illness not yet seen. Or a prisoner's account of life in a P.O.W. camp where the prisoners composed a symphony that is found and performed to great acclaim, changing the course of music history.

These things happen. I've seen it. But they can only happen if that knowledge has been protected.

In this way, "custodians" can be different from "gatekeepers". The former are the scholars and librarians and teachers and conservators who protect the sources of knowledge from whatever threat. The latter are those who manipulate knowledge to their own ends. There's a huge difference.