The last printed book
The last printed book will have as its subject the history of printed books and the value of these objects. The author of this work will be the owner of the last printed-book publishing house on the globe, which will have survived the paper crisis thanks to a few self-help titles aimed at an audience still poorly adapted to the “immaterial” methods of diffusion of the written code.
The first chapter will set out to trace a brief history of the press, giving some emphasis to the person of Gutenberg and his movable type. It will recall the arduous times when a few heroes carved, in woodcut, the pages of the Bible in Gothic characters — letter by letter, page by page — and how the emergence of the press transmuted this picture for the better. It will evoke the almost material character of printed type, how one could touch the surface of the page and feel the body of the letters.
Next, our dear author will do us the favor of recalling the great service rendered to the masses by the diffusion of printed texts, finally giving common people the opportunity to become literate, once the privilege of very few. And this alone will not suffice: we will also be reminded that the diffusion of texts and books changed the very way humanity in general thinks. Reality ceased to be inhospitable, magical, unknown: knowledge arrived for everyone, women and men, from infants to elders.
Then the last printed book will present a reflection on the human/book relationship. Our author will apply a particular dramatic zeal at this point: he will cite books that changed the course of history, books that pulled other books out of ostracism, books that awakened great sleeping minds, books that saved lives. He will then mention man’s affective relationship with his objects: the pleasure of keeping a special book that evokes good memories, of owning a private library, of collecting literature in assorted shapes, colors and sizes.
And it is at this point that the arguments of the author of the last printed book will not be as reasonable as the initial ones — not to say somewhat desperate. He will appeal to fetishism; he will summon the supposed pleasures of taking a book out of its packaging, smelling the new pages, running one’s fingers over the still-intact cover. He will further say that there will always be trees in sufficient quantity to make more and more paper, that the ecologists are gravely mistaken, that cellulose is nature’s submission to a noble cause. He will close his argument by claiming that printed books are a living part of human thought, a cultural legacy whose extinction will bring man a certain misery of identity.
The last printed book will be a sales flop and a laughingstock in the new literary circles. A disgruntled employee of the last publishing house will “leak” the book’s digital master to the worldwide computer network, and the non-printed version of the last printed book will circulate online, at high speed. Interested readers will carry it in their electronic readers, as a curious artifact from a strange time, where everything seemed excessive, space-consuming and dusty.