McGill University is joining the ranks of educational institutions that are digitizing their rare book collections for mass consumption (via Rare Book News).

On the whole I tend to see these projects as a positive move towards making antiquarian and obscure scholarship available to a much larger group than might otherwise be able to make use of these things.

I did a brief stint in the early 1990s at a Canadian federal government department, which shall remain nameless, doing technical support. This was at a time when the web was just hitting our collective radar as the emergent phenomenon of the still geek-ghetto Internet.

I was frankly shocked at the number of people I met who had spent fifteen to twenty years laboriously producing quite good research on both Canadian and international topics, for reports that sat on a shelf in the same building in which they were produced—and never actually read by anyone else beyond an approving manager. Although all of these reports were theoretically available to the public, who the hell was ever going to find them?

The web completely revolutionized the mission of this department and they now maintain one of the best Canadian government sites, which is loaded with good to excellent research, data and summary reports that the general public can actually benefit from.

So, I’m generally pro digitization.

Except this year I read the amazing Vernor Vinge’s Hugo award winning Rainbows End. (“Amazing Vernor Vinge” makes him sound like some kind of magician…which he is in a way.) This wonderful post-cyberpunk, techno-thriller novel contains the bibliophiles’ worst nightmare: a book scanning device that shreds book, shelf and all—like a demonic wood chipper—as it absorbs the contents (or most of them anyway) of the text.

Now I wake up in the middle of the night with afterimages of a scaly, slavering giant named Google chomping and belching his way through my private dream library.

Long synonymous in the West for the middle-of-nowhere, Timbuktu has a fascinating history as a crossroads where Malinke, Berber, Islamic, and French cultures met, mingled and clashed since before the Middle Ages. A recent article in Der Spiegel (via Bookninja) describes efforts to preserve “an enchanted Aladdin’s Cave” of thousands of manuscripts and documents representing centuries of Timbuktu’s socio-political history.

The article above is well worth a read, but it also made me think of a band I’ve been listening to recently that I want to share with you: Tinariwen.

Tinariwen are a group made up of Tuareg nomads from the Timbuktu area who got together in Gaddafi’s training camps in Libya. Leaving politics aside completely, Tinariwen look like they just stepped out of the desert:

But what they play is unquestionably rock and roll. It sounds like blues from beyond time, but their music is completely accessible to Western listeners. A friend of mine described it as “ur-blues” and I think that’s as good a label as any. There’s something primal about Tinariwen’s sound that transcends cultural or genre barriers, but there is nothing coy or affected about their music.

Tinariwen’s sound is a perfect analogy for the crossroads nature of Timbuktu itself.

Back at the end of February, I wrote briefly about the influential Mervyn Peake and his novels, poetry and art.

Enter the Octopus recently posted a wonderful excerpt of a new book by the perhaps equally influential Michael Moorcock entitled LOVERS: Mervyn and Maeve Peake. A personal memoir.

I love the unabashedly hero-worshipful tone of Moorcock’s work here: “Mervyn was dramatically handsome and his wife Maeve was dramatically beautiful.” And here: “…Mervyn and Maeve Peake were conventionally English in their formality while being unselfconscious romantics to the core. They did not posture. They did not cultivate the grotesque or the bizarre, though Mervyn might be attracted to eccentric-looking subjects. They were not burdened, as some of their contemporaries like Dylan Thomas were. They got on better with the self-effacing Graham Greene than the flamboyant Quentin Crisp.”

Moorcock paints a vivid picture of the bohemian gatherings of the Peake’s, while setting them above the fray. They are obviously the only people at the party you’d really want to know. I’m hooked on this memoir in one page. 

Also interesting, at the bottom of this post I found an automatically generated link to a separate piece on Crowley contemporary and automatic art proponent Austin Osman Spare, who, like Peake, was a War Artist. I’m fascinated by war artists and think Spare’s “Dressing the Wounded during a Gas Attack” is one of the most harrowing examples of the art. There is something incredibly surreal in having a bunch of artists running around during the thick of battle capturing sketches of the mayhem for later paintings—particularly in eras when the camera existed. But there is an undeniable power to some of the work of the war artists. The best of them, like Peake and Spare, captured some essential human horror that escapes the camera’s ability.

And, of course, their war-time experiences permeated their later art.

Over a month ago, this story surfaced about the reprinting of an early science fiction novella, which previously only existed in two volumes in two different libraries. The Great Romance, written by an anonymous author using the pseudonym “The Inhabitant”, is thought to be the earliest known book to describe space exploration in terms of the colonization of other worlds. It apparently even deals with the now prosaic challenges of space travel such as shuttles, space suits and air-locks. And while it is perhaps not a thrilling read, these kinds of early utopian and scientific romance works are occasionally very interesting in terms of the influence they may have had over other writers.

According to academic Dominic Alessio: “In the history of SF The Great Romance appears to form an important bridge between Bellamy’s To Whom this May Come and another noteworthy and influential SF work of the late nineteenth century, namely The Coming Race, which was written in 1871 by the British novelist, dramatist, politician and statesman Edward Bulwer-Lytton.”

This story reminded me of an interesting novel that is an example of the opposite kind of forgotten classic: a work that anticipated the work of other better-known writers. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder written by James De Mille—a Canadian author from the Maritimes—was only published posthumously. Had it been printed when it was written, De Mille’s novel would have been one of the earliest Victorian-era “lost world” novels. The important difference between De Mille’s work and the works of Haggard or Conan Doyle being the cutting Swiftian satire of De Mille’s hidden world.

Not to get all nationalistic, but it’s probably not a coincidence that both of these “lost” classics were written in former colonies.