But you know we live in a world where all of us in this room take books for granted. We throw books on the floor, we throw books at people, we load them in and out of our backpacks, we drop them here and drop them there, we lose them, we rip them up, we write all over them — I write all over mine. It's only a few generations ago when there really weren't any bookstores to go to. Your great-great-grandparents couldn't meander a bookstore, to speak of, unless they lived in a special section of a special city. Books are precious things. A lot of them are assigned in this course. There's short ones, little ones, big ones, syntheses, novels, monographs. Think of a book, just for a moment, and then you can forget this if you want. But think of a book, any book. It's hard to think of a really bad book this way, but think of a good book, one of your favorite books ever, as like a newborn child, a newborn child brought into the world. A book. Probably a lot more planning and thought and design and construction, at least intellectually, goes into that book than goes into most babies. Books have a cover. They have beginnings, middles and ends. They're somebody's dream, they're somebody's creation. They never satisfy — just like people — but they're in some ways the greatest things we have, and sometimes it's nice to remind ourselves of that, in the places where we take them most for granted.
— David W. Blight, Ph.D, Professor of American History, Yale University and Director of the Gilder Lehman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition
Image: The books on Roy Takeno's desk in 1943 at the Manzanar Relocation Center, Inyo County, California (photograph by Ansel Adams, U.S. Library of Congress, public domain).
