Only on paper

Trolling through web sites I bookmarked long ago but haven't visited recently, I chanced across an article by Malcolm Gladwell, he of The Tipping Point. "The Social Life of Paper," published in The New Yorker in March 2002, is an extraordinary examination of the role of paper in modern society. It begins with an examination of why air traffic controllers are wedded to little slips of paper to help them track the planes they are responsible for, and why the process of developing a computer-based system to replace those scraps has already taken decades, and billions of dollars.

Gladwell finds convincing evidence that while the computer is great for storing data, when it comes to using and manipulating data, it often loses out to piles of paper pushed around on a messy desk. He cites The Myth of the Paperless Office, by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. Gladwell writes:

"Paper is tangible: we can pick up a document, flip through it, read little bits here and there, and quickly get a sense of it. (In another study on reading habits, Sellen and Harper observed that in the workplace, people almost never read a document sequentially, from beginning to end, the way they would read a novel.) Paper is spatially flexible, meaning that we can spread it out and arrange it in the way that suits us best. And it's tailorable: we can easily annotate it, and scribble on it as we read, without altering the original text."

Since I moved to Paris, leaving behind nearly all my files and books, and trading a really sweet home office for work on a dining room table, I've been trying to put more, and do more, on my computer. I keep previous drafts of stories on my hard drive but don't print them out. I try to download and store reference material rather than clip or copy it. Part of the motivation for that -- aside from the lack of a nice, big flat surface to work on -- was an environmentalist impulse. I like to print out a fresh copy of every page I revise, and subsequent pages if the revision changes the line count. I'll change a single word, print out the page, look at it, then decide whether to keep it. I could easily burn through a carton of paper to produce a single short story. Why kill a tree if I could accomplish the same result by moving around some electrons?

Turns out I can't accomplish the same result, and now I know why.

An Occurrence at Barter Books

So we're knocking around England's Lake District last week and it is, of course, raining, it being England. In Kendal, where there is not much to do, particularly when it's raining, we shelter in an Ottakar bookstore (but the sovereign in the Tintin adventure is King Ottokar, go figure), and I pick up Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, not because I don't already have several hundred books and magazines to read, including a half-dozen I've brought along on the trip, but because buying books makes me feel good, at least until I remember I have several hundred books and magazines I haven't yet read. It's the new edition from Bloomsbury, with drawings by Ralph Steadman.

I'm not sure I've read Bierce before, but I'd certainly heard the name. He disappeared without a trace in 1913 on his way to cover the Mexican Revolution and was never heard from again. Bierce, Judge Crater and Amelia Earheart figured in a lot of tales about alien abductions. The introduction to Devil's Dictionary, by Angus Calder, piqued my interest in Bierce and his fiction (which owes something to Poe, but Bierce's language remains clever and sharp where Poe's, these days, can seem musty).

So, days later, we're in Anwick, in Barter Books, reportedly one of, if not the, best used bookstore in Britain. (Housed in a former railroad station, it certainly must be one of the best looking.) I walk inside, and am struck by a display of wee books, orange bindings facing out. Turns out they're Penguin 60-shilling editions. Released to coincide with the publisher's 60th anniversary, they're about half the area of a trade paperback and run less than a hundred pages.

I reach onto the shelf of about 40 of the things and pull out ... An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce.

Devil's Dictionary doesn't have an entry for coincidence but I like the one for accident: "An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws."