As I was finishing “Old & Rare: 40 Years in the Book Business,” Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern’s fabulous book on their adventures in the antiquarian book trade, I came across a prescient bit on the dangers of technology as they saw it.
A brief digression: If you love books, and haven’t read this, then you should. I expect those of you who fall into this category already know this, but just in case . . .
The statement in question occurs late in the text, as the authors reflect on changes to their chosen trade four decades later. The text was written in 1988:
If the human being is what he eats, so too the computer is what it is fed. Sometimes we fear that, in feeding the computer all our knowledge, we will no longer possess that knowledge. We are minded of the legendary stories about such booksellers as George D. Smith of New York who remembered “every title in a book catalogue, with it’s price, . . . what it has fetched at auction, who the buyer was, and often the names of the underbidders.” If he had fed all that information to a computer, would George D. Smith still have remembered it? And we recall the stories about George Littlefield of Boston who shunned even the card filing system because “he had it all in his head.” We know that, when we succumbed to the adding machine, we stopped doing mental arithmetic. Our plea to devotees of modern technology is simply that it should remain their servant, not their master, and that they should try to keep it all in their heads even after they have fed it to their computer. We have an idea that the “head” does not go “down” quite so frequently as the computer.
