What IS a Book?
Warning: the logical conclusion of this article might offend you. Sorry, not sorry.
I closed my diatribe about the trial/THE TRIAL—which recapped a first-in-history confession, in court and under oath! from book-industry powers-that-be about realities those of us who have been in the business since before Jeff Bezos first realized books are the foundation of enormous wealth—with the words,
What are books, anyway, and why do people keep writing them?
Here’s the “walk with me, boys and girls” part of the story, because a book is a time stamp. That’s it. Nothing more—yet all that such a fact encompasses. I’ll unpack.
Whether nonfiction, memoir, fiction, or even graphic novel, a book says, “I am here, now. This is what I see, what I perceive, what I know, what I expect, what I love, what I’m afraid of, what I think, what I surmise, what I predict right this very moment.
Yesterday, I might have been in a different place, probably leading up to now. Tomorrow I may be somewhere else entirely. But for right now… in my life… at this time… LOOK AT ME!! … I am here.
That’s all and everything every book ever written is. Every. Book. Not just since Gutenberg. All books. All books.
Archeologists have always known that. They examine the carvings on cave walls and hieroglyphics on/inside pyramids and tombs and know those writings are carefully etched recordings, slivers of clues about life in that narrow, finite wink.
Those writers were likely scribes, not authors, so let’s look at that since those terms are important. In 1976, about sixty-seven percent of adults around the world were literate, i.e., they could read and write. Today, that’s percentage is a little over eighty-seven, which is a hellova leap in less than fifty years. We likely have modern technology to thank for that. Can’t work a computer if you can’t read what’s on the screen.
But in the days when Egyptian tombs were being inscribed, hardly anyone would read, much less write those complex hieroglyphics. Think five percent of the population; some authorities put it closer to one. Clearly, those people spent years learning their craft so they could write… what the person paying them said to. They were the first ghostwriters, doing their best to convey what their authors wanted to preserve for… whoever might be able to read what was being chiseled into the stone. Who was going to naysay a mis-chiseled word? You think a bevy of red-penned editors were looking over the scribe’s shoulder as he (it was probably a he) labored in the torchlight?
Betcha not.
Betcha there were no developmental, line, or copy editors nitpicking over the scribe/ghostwriters carefully preserving their biblical authors’ words on parchment for all the world to not read—since a good ninety-percent of the Jesus’ fellows were not schooled in that specialized art.
In fact, ya gotta figure less than five percent of any ancient population was up to the task of inscribing, much less deciphering, said narratives. We in modern times like to speculate about who wrote what book—or section or passage thereof—but I’ll bet dimes to dollars no one can name the individual wielding the stiff reed as they tried to take down their master’s ramblings on papyrus or possibly even potsherds or wax tablets.
And again, what literary know-it-all was there to say, “Hey, you’re putting down the same thing on this table that you wrote for the other guy over there”?
Which brings us to a sad but still persistent truth: not all ghostwriters/writers/scribes are 100 percent true to their authors’ voice, intent, and perspective. We are, after all, individuals ourselves (although I’ve heard tell of agents who think otherwise), and if’n “this” word sounds better to our ear than “that,” an awful lot of us will render “this,” not “that” unto Caesar. Or possibly both. Or maybe another, more gooder, term altogether. Who would know?
Really, I mean it—who would know? And if they knew, who would they tell? And for what reason?
Not the author, that’s for bloody sure. If’n the author could read and write, they wouldn’t have had to rely on a scribe. Or a series of scribes, if the first one’s father died and they had to go home to take care of their mother and siblings… the second got hauled off into service to die in a drunken brawl on some foreign soil… the third got bought off by a parvenu with a heavier pouch of gold… and the fourth got crucified, literally, for being in the wrong bed at the wrong time with the wrong wife/concubine/boyfriend.
And therein, my fellow babies, lies yet another non-uncomfortable reality about books: the best of them have many, many thumbprints on their final version. Not some. All. All books. And not just modern books. All Books All The Time. Throughout All Time.
‘Cause, see, Twain had an editor. Faulkner had an editor. The Bronte sisters had editors. Dostoyevsky had an editor. And before there were editors, before Gutenberg figured out how to reproduce the written word, scribes were the editors, inadvertently or not.
Did the author of I Ching have an editor? Bet they did. Bet the accepted edition, while presented in the same form as the original, was not the original version. Bet there were amendments and modifications and rewordings and alterations and additions and deletions throughout the centuries. Because that’s the way love stories, heroic adventures, continuous-process-improvement tomes, and sacred texts rock and roll. All books.
And what about the clearly anthology nature of sacred texts, the Apocrypha, the I Ching, the Vedas, the Book of Shadows, and yes, the Torah, Bible, and Qur’an? Scribes, scribes, scribes, my darlin’s. Quoting verbatim as they listened, filling in what seemed reasonable as they missed something, throwing in what they put down from a previous master if the story seems of a piece… and making it all read more gooder to their elite sensibilities, since the risk of discovery was nil or less.
Those who claim a deity carved the Ten Commandments on stone tablets with a fiery finger never mention how the rest of Moses’ five books came into being. Betcha it wasn’t through divine finger painting. And betcha whoever set stylus to wax, or pottery was paraphrasing like crazy, as we all do when our boss is shoulder peering and foot tapping.
Onaccounta, let’s face it: mankind hasn’t changed. We still have as many kind, loving specimens as we ever had. The same measure of lambs-to-the slaughter as ever. The volume of nasties, self-absorbed creeps as in every other era. There has always been, and will always be, handfuls of ne’re do wells who want all the sticks, all the shiny stones, the wenches, the boy toys, the castles and dungeons, the railroads, pipelines, and nuclear codes.
It doesn’t take an Osiris or a da Vinci or even an Einstein to figure out why that last group tends to control the publishing and distribution agencies so they can author (although not necessarily write) most of the books and dole out information to and as it suits them. What more profit can man have than to control the time stamps of the species?
Which brings us to Part III of this I-didn’t-realize-would-be-a-series:
“… and why do people keep writing them?”
Look for it next week right here, same Bat time on the same Bat channel[1].
[1] Closing line of every Batman episode, a 1960s classic camp on ABC TV comedy based on Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s comic book character The Batman; created by Lorenzo Semple Jr. and William Dozier; starring Adam West, Burt Ward, Alan Napier, and Neil Hamilton.