The archives

How long do books last?

Our consultant with the large library finished his reading of Washington Irving’s Sketch-Book, an edition without a printing date but with a preface from 1848; it has the name of an ancestor and “1901” written on the fly-leaf.  Splitting the difference, it is maybe 150 years old.  In some ways it was a near-run thing.  The paper is brittle and tears at the least mishandling; it’s not far from crumbling away entirely.  He’s forced to admit that it was not an expensive edition in the first place.  Some pages are printed off-register and sentences are partially lost.  Indeed, many of the books from his inherited library are showing their age, partly from having been cheap editions when first purchased, partly from storage and handling that (to say the least) has not been archival.  None is particularly valuable as a printed book, since more recent and more durable editions exist of each.  He will keep them as family heirlooms, of course.  But the matter does raise the question of how long books last.

It varies enormously with how they were produced in the first place.  Much of our consultant’s inherited library, as noted, is made up inexpensive editions, produced in response to the explosion of literacy in the nineteenth century (and snapped up by a family for whom reading was always important).  They were not intended to last centuries, rather to make literature widely available.  There are many more durable books; indeed, some of the first books printed on paper are still in good shape 500 years later.  It helps to pay attention to the papers and inks, and to take proper care of leather bindings.

There are written works older than printed paper.  The standard in Medieval Europe was the hand-written volume on vellum or parchment, made from animal skins (mainly sheep).  Examples of those have lasted over a thousand years; they’re very tough.  The record for written work, though, is held by cuneiform clay tablets.  If buried in dry conditions, or if baked by (say) the building overhead being burned down, they’re as good as carving things in stone.  You can in principle hold in your hand a letter written five thousand years ago.

Nevertheless, much of what was written before the advent of printing on paper has completely perished.  We have no manuscripts from the ancient world.  What is left to us comes from copies of copies several times removed, as someone in the ages between thought it worthwhile to preserve a work.  There’s no point in wondering about Sophocles’ lost plays, since the copyists along the way did not think them worth the trouble of reproducing (which was, to be fair, considerable).

So there, if you wish, is the secret to a lasting literary legacy.  Don’t worry so much about archival paper and inks or climate-controlled storage vaults.  Write something that people in later ages will think it worthwhile to copy.