Glen Miranker's "Sherlock Holmes in 221oBjects" talk

It might seem weird to talk about books as mere "objects." They're BOOKS, right? Better than plain old objects! Right? Ahhhhh, maybe not. Let's talk about that.

Glen Miranker's exhibit, first displayed at the esteemed Grolier Club for top level bibliophiles, and now being shown at the Lilly Library at Indiana University where the BSI archives are kept, has a whole lot of books in it. Probably mostly books, and yet it is titled with "221 ObJECTS." (Forgive me for all the weird capitalization to get the "b" to pop for 221b.) Spending a few hours in the exhibit (and refreshments room next to it), Glen gave an excellent talk that really revealed the ultimate truth about books:

It isn't the books that are intrinsically special. It's the human connections that emanate from them.

Sure, there's the connection from author to reader. But what Glen Miranker got fascinatingly into in his lecture today was the connections that go beyond that. Author to publisher. Publisher to buyer. Buyer to author for inscription. Buyer to library to another buyer. 

Basing his talk on four particularly interesting volumes from his collection and the exhibit, Glen went into the special details of each, and then his tracing of how those details came to be. Previous owners, lost libraries, crime and punishment . . . his tales of book detection all had the very human stories that always make for a good talk. Backtracking books' paths through the hands of unknowns and powerfully famous has brought Glen in touch with all sorts of people, giving each book a story beyond the one just contained within its pages.

Listening to his talk, going back up to the exhibit to look at the book's he talked about in person again, it all made me eager to get back to my own library and spend a little more time with the odd old volumes in it. Not necessarily due to their rarity, but due to their stories. 

Just on my trip down, I picked up a pastiche titled Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Three Dragons, not because I love random pastichery, but because it was the product of a digital online publisher I'd never heard of, and the author, Luke Steven Fullenkamp, had signed it, meaning it had been in his hands at some point. Did he have a book release signing party? How often did this digital publisher print its books? The book interested me in many ways beyond its contents.

After Glen's talk, he was asked -- by publisher Steve Doyle, I think -- about how he had infected one of the people he was getting info from with Glen's own curiosity for tracking the path of books. Glen replied that in his experience, it was just something thinking people naturally were drawn to. Which brought it back to Sherlock Holmes, in my mind, and the natural curiosity of an active mind.

Glen Miranker's talk this afternoon really gave us all a lot to think about when looking at an old book, along with a lot of fascinating details he had learned from his own investigations. And it also made me think about how much books really are just another object, but one with a few more notable human connections we can see. (How many of us label or sign other possessions besides books?)

It's been a good day so far, and I'm taking a bit of a rest break to write this before proceeding to the two-scion pub dinner to come. More on that soon.