APRIL 10, 2021 – Recently, I cleared a stack of books from one nook of our house and deposited them in another cranny. In the process a thin paperback escaped my grip and fell lightly to the floor. It was The Amateur Emigrant by Robert Louis Stevenson. On the cover was an illustration of the Statue of Liberty. I couldn’t remember any previous encounter with this book.
I examined its back cover. “In 1879 Fanny Osbourne telegraphed Robert Louis Stevenson in Edinburgh,” it read, “begging him to join her in San Francisco; and the penniless young writer boarded an emigrant ship in the Clyde for the long voyage across the Atlantic.”
“Huh?” I grunted, nearly aloud. “I didn’t know [RLS] lived in that century, let alone was ‘young’ in 1879!” The impressions that Treasure Island and Kidnapped had made on my imagination less than 100 years after the author was a “young writer” left the corresponding perception that he’d lived in the late 1700s.
Intrigued by this book of non-fiction by the famous writer, I put it aside. A few hours later I sat down to read it—er, savor it. Currently, I’m four days out to sea.
Last night I took a break from the onboard commotions brought to life by Stevenson and found an isolated corner aft on the starboard deck (the reading room of our house) to plunge further into Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch. During a lull in the storm of that story, I put it aside and contemplated this whole book business. (Speaking of which . . . our “reading room” adjoins my wife’s office, where she oversees her online sales of a constantly changing inventory of around 4,000 used books.) My pondering led to an online search—“How many book titles worldwide.”
Google Books has applied a set of fancy algorithms to the question. The result: 129,864,880.
For kicks, I searched, “How many books published as of 1900?” The closest I came to a serviceable answer was an article on stuffnobodycaresabout.com. According to the New York State Library Bookboard, in 1907, 9,260 books were published in the U.S. By comparison, another source—Bowker, the world’s leading publisher of bibliographic information—calculated that in 2010, 316,480 books were published by traditional publishers. Another 2,776,260 titles were added by way of reprints of public domain works and self-published and “micro-niche” books, for a grand total (2010) of over three million. I don’t know if anyone has attempted to reconcile any portion of the Google Books figure with numbers appearing on “stuffnobodycaresabout.”
One thing leads to another: the world population in 1879 was around 1.5 billion. Currently, it’s close to 7.8 billion. What I’d like to know is the ratio of books to people—1879 vs. 2021. And for that matter, the ratio in the time of Socrates, who in Plato’s Phaedrus, denigrated the written word. (How ironic, that the spoken word of the sage would be forever memorialized by his student.)
Now back down into the bowels of that emigrant ship.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
