Every piece of tech­nol­o­gy has a prece­dent. Most have sev­er­al dif­fer­ent types of prece­dents. You’ve prob­a­bly used (and may well own) an eBook read­er, for instance, but what would have afford­ed you a selec­tion of read­ing mate­r­i­al two or three cen­turies ago? If you were a Jacobean Eng­lish­man of means, you might have used the kind of trav­el­ing library we fea­tured in August, a hand­some portable case cus­tom-made for your books. (If you’re Tom Stop­pard in the 21st cen­tu­ry, you still do.) If you were Napoleon, who seemed to love books as much as he loved mil­i­tary pow­er — he did­n’t just amass a vast col­lec­tion of them, but kept a per­son­al librar­i­an to over­see it — you’d take it a big step fur­ther.

“Many of Napoleon’s biog­ra­phers have inci­den­tal­ly men­tioned that he […] used to car­ry about a cer­tain num­ber of favorite books wher­ev­er he went, whether trav­el­ing or camp­ing,” says an 1885 Sacra­men­to Dai­ly Union arti­cle post­ed by Austin Kleon, “but it is not gen­er­al­ly known that he made sev­er­al plans for the con­struc­tion of portable libraries which were to form part of his bag­gage.” The piece’s main source, a Lou­vre librar­i­an who grew up as the son of one of Napoleon’s librar­i­ans, recalls from his father’s sto­ries that “for a long time Napoleon used to car­ry about the books he required in sev­er­al box­es hold­ing about six­ty vol­umes each,” each box first made of mahogany and lat­er of more sol­id leather-cov­ered oak. “The inside was lined with green leather or vel­vet, and the books were bound in moroc­co,” an even soft­er leather most often used for book­bind­ing.

To use this ear­ly trav­el­ing library, Napoleon had his atten­dants con­sult “a cat­a­logue for each case, with a cor­re­spond­ing num­ber upon every vol­ume, so that there was nev­er a moment’s delay in pick­ing out any book that was want­ed.” This worked well enough for a while, but even­tu­al­ly “Napoleon found that many books which he want­ed to con­sult were not includ­ed in the col­lec­tion,” for obvi­ous rea­sons of space. And so, on July 8, 1803, he sent his librar­i­an these orders:

The Emper­or wish­es you to form a trav­el­ing library of one thou­sand vol­umes in small 12mo and print­ed in hand­some type. It is his Majesty’s inten­tion to have these works print­ed for his spe­cial use, and in order to econ­o­mize space there is to be no mar­gin to them. They should con­tain from five hun­dred to six hun­dred pages, and be bound in cov­ers as flex­i­ble as pos­si­ble and with spring backs. There should be forty works on reli­gion, forty dra­mat­ic works, forty vol­umes of epic and six­ty of oth­er poet­ry, one hun­dred nov­els and six­ty vol­umes of his­to­ry, the remain­der being his­tor­i­cal mem­oirs of every peri­od.

In sum: not only did Napoleon pos­sess a trav­el­ing library, but when that trav­el­ing library proved too cum­ber­some for his many and var­ied lit­er­ary demands, he had a whole new set of not just portable book cas­es but even more portable books made for him. (You can see how they looked packed away in the image tweet­ed by Cork Coun­ty Library above.) This pre­fig­ured in a high­ly ana­log man­ner the dig­i­tal-age con­cept of recre­at­ing books in anoth­er for­mat specif­i­cal­ly for com­pact­ness and con­ve­nience — the kind of com­pact­ness and con­ve­nience now increas­ing­ly avail­able to all of us today, and to a degree Napoleon nev­er could have imag­ined, let alone demand­ed. It’s always good to be the Emper­or, but in many ways, it’s bet­ter to be a read­er in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Jacobean Trav­el­ing Library: The 17th Cen­tu­ry Pre­cur­sor to the Kin­dle

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

Vin­tage Pho­tos of Vet­er­ans of the Napoleon­ic Wars, Tak­en Cir­ca 1858

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study (1588)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

It has 240 pages filled with writ­ing and illus­tra­tion. Car­bon dat­ing places it around the year 1420. Schol­ars have spent count­less thou­sands of hours scru­ti­niz­ing it. But the so-called Voyn­ich Man­u­script has one qual­i­ty more notable than any oth­er: nobody under­stands a word of it. Last month, Josh Jones wrote about this sin­gu­lar­ly strange tex­tu­al arti­fact here at Open Cul­ture, includ­ing the dig­i­tized ver­sion at the Inter­net Archive that you can flip through and read your­self — or rather “read,” since the tex­t’s lan­guage, if it be a lan­guage at all, remains uniden­ti­fied. But before you do that, you might want to watch TED-Ed’s brief intro­duc­tion to the Voyn­ich Man­u­script above.

The video’s nar­ra­tor describes pages of “real and imag­i­nary plants, float­ing cas­tles, bathing women, astrol­o­gy dia­grams, zodi­ac rings, and suns and moons with faces accom­pa­ny the text,” read­ing from a script by Stephen Bax, Voyn­ich Man­u­script researcher and Pro­fes­sor of Mod­ern Lan­guages and Lin­guis­tics at the Open Uni­ver­si­ty.

“Cryp­tol­o­gists say the writ­ing has all the char­ac­ter­is­tics of a real lan­guage — just one that no one’s ever seen before.” High­ly dec­o­rat­ed through­out with “scroll-like embell­ish­ments,” the man­u­script fea­tures the work of what looks like no few­er than three hands: two who did the writ­ing, and one who did the paint­ing.

Intrigued yet? Or per­haps you already feel an inkling of a new the­o­ry to explain this bizarre, seem­ing­ly ency­clo­pe­dia-like vol­ume’s prove­nance to add to the many that have come before: some believe the man­u­scrip­t’s author or authors wrote it in code, some that “the doc­u­ment is a hoax, writ­ten in gib­ber­ish to make mon­ey off a gullible buy­er” by a “medieval con man” or even Voyn­ich him­self, and some that it shows an attempt “to cre­ate an alpha­bet for a lan­guage that was spo­ken, but not yet writ­ten.” Maybe the thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher Roger Bacon wrote it. Or maybe the Eliz­a­bethan mys­tic John Dee. Or maybe Ital­ian witch­es, or space aliens. At just a glance, the Voyn­ich Man­u­script pos­es ques­tions that could take an eter­ni­ty to answer — as any great work of lit­er­a­ture should.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

An odd phe­nom­e­non has been at work in the past few years. Print book sales slope upward while eBook sales creep down. The trend man­i­fests the oppo­site of what most people—or most peo­ple who write about these things—expected to hap­pen, quite rea­son­ably in many respects. Per­haps through sheer his­tor­i­cal momen­tum, print retains its aura of author­i­ty.

But every­one knows that buy­ing isn’t read­ing, which may indeed be in decline giv­en the pri­ma­cy of images, audio, and video, of YouTube explain­ers and doc­u­men­taries such as the one above, which tells the tale of the “Pack Horse Librar­i­ans.”

These for­got­ten heroes, like the famed Pony Express, braved wind, rain, and rough ter­rain to deliv­er books to iso­lat­ed set­tlers who oth­er­wise may have had noth­ing to read.

But this is not a tale of cow­boys and fron­tiers­men. The Pack Horse Librar­i­ans appeared in an Indus­tri­al Age, and what’s more they were most­ly women. Called “book ladies” and “pack­sad­dle librar­i­ans,” the librar­i­ans were dep­u­tized dur­ing the New Deal, when FDR sought to end the Great Depres­sion by cre­at­ing hun­dreds of jobs addressed to the country’s real social, mate­r­i­al, and cul­tur­al needs. In this case, the Pack Horse Librar­i­ans respond­ed to what many of us might con­sid­er a cri­sis, if not a crime.

“About 63% of the res­i­dents of Ken­tucky were with­out access to pub­lic libraries,” and some­where around 30% of rur­al Ken­tuck­ians were illit­er­ate. Those rur­al Ken­tuck­ians saw edu­ca­tion as a way out of pover­ty, and the Works Progress Admin­is­tra­tion agreed, over­see­ing the book deliv­ery project between 1935 and 1943. “Book women” made around $28 a month (a lit­tle over $500 in 2017) deliv­er­ing books to homes and school­hous­es. By 1936, writes the site Appalachi­an His­to­ry, “hand­made and donat­ed mate­ri­als could not sus­tain the cir­cu­la­tion needs of the pack horse patrons.”

Sur­veys of read­ers found that pack horse patrons could not get enough of books about trav­el, adven­ture and reli­gion, and detec­tive and romance mag­a­zines. Children’s pic­ture books were also immense­ly pop­u­lar, not only with young res­i­dents but also their illit­er­ate par­ents. Per head­quar­ters, approx­i­mate­ly 800 books had to be shared among five to ten thou­sand patrons.

To com­pen­sate for scarci­ty, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Ken­tucky pre­sen­ta­tion notes, librar­i­ans them­selves cre­at­ed books of “moun­tain recipes and scrap books of cur­rent events.” But the ser­vice quick­ly grew to deliv­er­ing more than 3,000 donat­ed books per month, after a dri­ve in which every PTA mem­ber in the state gave to the cause.

Eleanor Roo­sevelt (pho­tographed above vis­it­ing a Pack­horse Library in West Lib­er­ty, KY) was a cham­pi­on of the ser­vice, which founder Eliz­a­beth Fuller­ton mod­eled after a sim­i­lar ven­ture in 1913, itself a pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion of work done by the Ken­tucky Fed­er­a­tion of Women’s Clubs in the late 19th cen­tu­ry.

We can see that the his­to­ry of women librar­i­ans on horse­back goes back quite a ways. But it is a his­to­ry now for­got­ten, despite the efforts of recent books like Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librar­i­ans of Ken­tucky. A recent trend involves sug­gest­ing his­tor­i­cal Amer­i­can fig­ures who might replace all those mon­u­ments to the Con­fed­er­a­cy. We might well add Pack Horse Librar­i­ans to the dis­tin­guished list of can­di­dates.

The ser­vice lost its fund­ing in 1943, “leav­ing some com­mu­ni­ties with­out access to books for decades,” Appalachi­an His­to­ry writes, “until book­mo­biles were intro­duced to the area in the late 1950s.” These ser­vices seem quaint in an era when wide­spread deliv­ery by drone seems immi­nent. We seem­ing­ly live in the most infor­ma­tion-rich, instant access soci­ety in his­to­ry. Yet a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of peo­ple in the U.S. and around the world have lit­tle to no access to the inter­net. And a sim­i­lar degree of illiteracy—at least of basic infor­ma­tion and crit­i­cal reasoning—may war­rant a sim­i­lar­ly direct inter­ven­tion.

via The Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Libraries Shaped Like Doc­tor Who’s Time-Trav­el­ing TARDIS Pop Up in Detroit, Saska­toon, Macon & Oth­er Cities

Strik­ing Poster Col­lec­tion from the Great Depres­sion Shows That the US Gov­ern­ment Once Sup­port­ed the Arts in Amer­i­ca

The Future of Con­tent Deliv­ery

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness