JOY ALONG THE WAY: WHAT WOULD GUTENBERG THINK OF E-PUBLISHING?

I hope that I shall never look

Into a glassy screen to read a book,

A book upon whose shiny pages

Will lack the romance of the ages.

They tell me it is coming, yea, is already here -- books you read on the computer screen. I try to imagine how starkly clinical Joyce Kilmer's poem "Trees" might look on a "page" of an electronically published book. There would be no texture to feel, no subtle paper/leathery odor to smell, no familiar fuzzy-edged pages, nothing to conjure up the mood of past readings, the ambiance of a comfortable chair, the right light and the heft of the book in your hand.

I cringe at the searing contempt in which I would be held for not falling into the line of "progress." "An eccentric, still fondling her old musty books," "Trapped in the long-running Gutenberg Age," "Stubbornly clinging to ancient ways," might be some of the comments.

The electronic publishers eagerly explain how much space would be saved by reading from the one glassy screen instead of searching among the shelved books to read or re-read something that stirred your heart upon the first reading, shelves where dust sometimes settles and silverfish dare to roam. They tell how easy it would be to access the computerized pages, how the renewal of copyright would be eliminated, how the book would never go out of print, etc.

OK. Have at it, I say. But you haven't broken my shell of remonstrance yet. You are nibbling away though by recalling to my memory a college friend's diatribe against the then approaching world of TV. "Ruination!" she screamed in her thesis and layed out, supposed fact by fact, how this ruination would come about. I smile now at her "hard shell." But, to alleviate some of my worry about lagging behind, encased in such a shell, I can see in some instances she was right in a way she never dreamed of.

After all the glassy promotional printed material has been read and samples of such publishing shown, I walk to my shelf where I keep my favorite books and pull out David Grayson's, "Places of Retirement." I don't have to read it for I know it by heart, but there on page 63 (an upper corner of the page is missing) are the words, "The best partners of solitude are books. I like to take a book with me in my pocket, although I find the world so full of interesting things sights, sounds, odors I never read a word of it. It's like having a valued friend with you, though you walk for miles without saying a word to him or he to you, but if you really know your friend, it is a curious thing how, subconsciously, you are aware of what he is thinking and feeling."

Thus at eventide I look at the creeping shadows, hear the sleepy twitterings of the birds, the whispering of the tree leaves and I whisper, "How about this, David (Thoreau)? Is this not a delicious evening when the whole body is one sense and imbibes through every pore as you so eloquently describe on page 140 telling about life at the Pond?

"That page, David, that has a small coffee stain on it and that funny little page number encased in parentheses, unlike the rest of the numbered pages?"

I pull a little volume of Emily Dickinson's "Think Tenderly of me," from my smock pocket and re-read about how she said she danced along life's dingy ways until she found a book. How could I get a computer with a glassy screen in my smock pocket?

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.