Jackie Hemond
A few years ago, the American Library Association titillated with a slightly risqué theme for adult summer reading. “Between the Covers” inferred naughtiness but its graphical representation was chaste. With tears falling, the monster, Frankenstein, was in a twin bed reading Gone with the Wind while an aghast Scarlett O’Hara was positioned in another twin bed, reading Frankenstein. Scarlett and Frankenstein were linked by a book spine, but were obviously not even in the same room. I thought it was clever and humorous, but for some librarians, it must have evoked too much heavy breathing, since many libraries, that year, used the graphic of an open book, with the words, “Between the Covers” on top. Sigh!
I only remembered this because of another tantalizing article I read this month regarding the pages between the covers of a book. Teraherz, a new imaging technology using electromagnetic waves developed by the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, can read through the cover and pages of a book without turning pages. It’s a neat trick and also potentially very useful. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art is very interested in the process because they have a lot of antique books which have deteriorated so much that they should not be opened, or even touched. The technology is still so young that only a nine-page book can be read successfully, but experts promise that it will be possible to scan an entire book in the near future.
Other technologies, one using wavelengths of light and the other a CT scan process, are being used to virtually unroll 4,000-year-old papyrus scrolls. These technologies can possibly read charred scrolls carbonized in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.
The Kent Memorial Library also has some historical books in various stages of deterioration. Even when the teraherz technology is available, our library will not be able to afford it. What we need to do, and soon, is to open those books carefully and digitally scan their pages so contents are not lost. All history is local. In the library, we have local history galore. It would be a shame to lose it.
But, let’s return to reading. Summer reading is gone, although the library’s summer reading statistics were great. 419 adults signed on for summer reading and participants in the teen and children programs numbered 324. However, have you noticed it’s getting cold outside? Late fall reading is here. In this season, my favorite place to read is snuggled between the covers at night. Do you want to do it together?