Not just a bag of words, but a thing held by human hands.By Alexis C. Madrigal BookTraces is a new project to track down the human markings in 19th-century books that, in the era of digitization, will (at best) end up in deep storage throughout the nation's library system. The books are "a massive, distributed archive of the history of reading, hidden in plain sight in the circulating collections," the site argues. "Marginalia, inscriptions, photos, original manuscripts, letters, drawings, and many other unique pieces of historical data can be found in individual copies... Each book has to be opened and examined." While the...
What Is a Book?
