Thomas Jefferson

When I was in elementary school, I read, as a class assignment, words written by Thomas Jefferson. He instantly became my hero. He still is, and has been, all through my life since that moment in 5th grade. Enjoy.

The New York Times
May 21, 2006
Expanding on Jefferson
By ADAM GOODHEART

In the midsummer of 1817, the old man rode down from his mountaintop to the outskirts of the nearby village and worked at dreaming up colonnades and pavilions where none existed. Thomas Jefferson left no detailed description of his own labors in designing the University of Virginia, but he did leave a thin paperbound memorandum book, its pages crowded with rows of figures penned in a minute, almost delicate hand — calculating the exact slope of a terrace, the mathematical relationship between a cornice and an architrave and how many bricks it would take to build 16 dormitory rooms (precisely 298,978). That notebook is preserved today in the university's archives, and as you gingerly turn its pages, it is easy to imagine the founder and former president, tall and slightly stooped, striding purposefully around the fallow cornfield with his compass and theodolite — assisted by the 10 slaves he had brought down with him from Monticello.

Nearly two centuries later, I sat in a room at one end of that former cornfield in Charlottesville, Va., as another group of men (and, this time, a few women) tried to design another group of buildings. It was a task they were approaching with rather more diffidence — some might call it reverence — than their institution's founder had done. "This is consecrated ground," said one distinguished gray-haired man. "What we're doing is sort of like putting a wing on the Taj Mahal."

The university's board of visitors — what most schools would call their trustees, but for this, as for many other things, Virginia has its own quaint nomenclature — was gathered around an immense oval conference table, beneath an 1816 portrait of Jefferson in his study at Monticello. Blue suits and salmon pink ties were very much in evidence among this group, as were the lanky builds and equine features that were already recognized 200 years ago as hallmarks of a particularly Virginian physique. The matter at hand was the construction of a 110,000-square-foot $105 million annex, just south of the original Jeffersonian campus. The planned new complex, known as the South Lawn, was intended to house most classrooms and faculty offices for the university's traditional core: its College of Arts and Sciences. The project had been under discussion for the better part of a decade, the original architect had recently thrown up his hands and quit and the university's trustees were now about to evaluate yet another new set of renderings (perhaps the fourth; everyone had lost count).

Moreover, in the view of some of the people in the room, the original artistic vision of Jefferson — or rather, "Mr. Jefferson," as he is still often called in Charlottesville — had lately come under attack.

The initial spark was struck last summer, after the university announced unexpectedly that it had ended its four-year relationship with the acclaimed architect James Polshek, whose New York-based firm had been hired, amid much fanfare, to design the South Lawn. Word in Charlottesville had it that Polshek's office — which had won national renown for such widely praised modernist projects as the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock and the Rose planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History — had become frustrated by the school's refusal to approve any design that did not hew to a strict Classical palette of arches and columns.

A group of malcontents at the university's School of Architecture had published an open letter assailing the administration's effort to turn the campus into a "theme park of nostalgia": an assemblage of mediocre, slavishly neo-Classical buildings. On the other side, certain members of the board had nightmares of something big and boxy and glassy — something that looked, as one of them put it at the meeting, "industrial" — looming alongside Jefferson's sacred precinct. The debate had spilled over to the rest of the faculty — and, via Internet newsgroups and blogs, had even drawn in architects around the world.

Now the board was under pressure to make up its mind so that construction could begin in the autumn. "There are some very strong opinions on both sides of the aisle, but I have heard you all and heard you clearly," said the university's architectural coordinator, David Neuman, with just a hint of weariness in his voice. "Rest assured, we are going to make sure that what we're building is something we're all proud of."

Around the conference table, more than one of the handsome equine faces betrayed a flicker of doubt. On the wall above them, Mr. Jefferson's painted countenance held its peace.

For an architect, designing any new building at the University of Virginia is like stepping onstage at the Metropolitan Opera moments after Pavarotti has brought the house down with a heart-stopping aria. A certain degree of performance anxiety is liable to set in.

The university's original grounds — a real Virginian never, ever, says "campus" — which Jefferson designed, are an icon of American architecture. Together with Monticello, they form one of a handful of places in this country that the United Nations has recognized as World Heritage sites — on par with the Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty.

What Jefferson did with the slanting, muddy cornfield was, even to a layperson's eye, astonishing. First, he terraced the ground so that it fell away in a series of gently sloping ledges. At the top end, he placed the Rotunda, a majestically domed and columned building modeled after the Pantheon in Rome — and meant to serve as a library, to signal the pre-eminence of reason instead of religion at the new university. Stretching down from the Rotunda on each side, hemming the stepped terraces on the east and west, Jefferson laid a single-file line of low dormitory rooms and classroom pavilions, fronted by corridors of white Tuscan columns, with more student rooms, gardens and dining halls ranged behind. The south end of this elongated quadrangle (known as the Lawn, always capitalized) was left open.

The resulting ensemble, like much great architecture, appears simple at first glance — red brick and white columns on three sides of a grassy field — but turns out, as you explore it further, to offer inexhaustible complexities. Critics have seen in its design an embodiment of the Old World and New World in harmony — with the Lawn's open south end, and its view along the distant valleys of the Virginia Piedmont, symbolizing the unbounded possibilities of the American continent (or, if you prefer, the unending quest for knowledge, or the romantic embrace of nature, or perhaps the imperfect state of all mortal architecture). If the Declaration of Independence was the great philosophical statement of Jefferson's youth, the Lawn and its surroundings were the masterful peroration of his final years.

Although the university has hired many prominent architects over the succeeding years — from Stanford White to Michael Graves — none have built nearly so well as Jefferson did. Many critics say the administration's long string of unfortunate choices began in 1896, when it engaged White to seal up the Lawn's open southern end, blocking Jefferson's boundless view with a middlebrow building, designed in a Gilded Age version of Georgian taste. (According to some historians, it was also meant to block the sight of a working-class African-American neighborhood that had encroached upon the no-longer-quite-so-boundless view.) Worse was to come: in 1952, just behind White's structure, the university erected New Cabell Hall — neither fish nor fowl, modernist nor neo-Classical, but simply a redbrick hulk that looks like nothing so much as a postwar suburban middle school.

So, when driven by a pressing need for classroom and office space, administrators of the school's undergraduate program began talking several years ago about building a new, larger and far more ambitious addition to the Lawn — one that would, moreover, strive to extend and reinterpret Jefferson's original plan — there was reason for worry.

The one thing everyone in Charlottesville seems to agree on is that the South Lawn's design needs to be "Jeffersonian." The problem is that everyone has a different definition of what this means — and it doesn't always involve red bricks and white columns.

"Thomas Jefferson was constantly inventing new building technologies," Karen Van Lengen, dean of the university's School of Architecture, told me recently. "He laid glass panes over one another like shingles to make skylights. As materials change, you can create things that you couldn't create before — Jefferson would've understood that."

A former associate of I.M. Pei — and a friend of James Polshek — Van Lengen took over the highly ranked architecture school in 1999, moving to Charlottesville from New York. She and her family gave up a loft on Broome Street for one of the Lawn's 10 original "pavilions": the magnificent colonnaded structures that Jefferson designed as faculty residences and classrooms. The one she rents, Pavilion IX, is particularly elegant in its architecture, and Van Lengen has filled it with a combination of furniture lent by the university (a Hepplewhite sideboard; a mahogany dining table) and artwork brought from New York (a Frank Stella print; a Saul Steinberg tabletop construction; and organic-looking abstractions in beaten copper by her husband, the sculptor James Welty). The effect is unexpected but pleasing — and it feels more authentically Jeffersonian in spirit, closer to Monticello and its walls bedecked with Indian artifacts and buffalo hides, than does, say, the board's conference room with its repro-Federal-style décor.

Under Van Lengen, the architecture school — known in the 1980's as a haven for neotraditionalists — has stood decisively in the modernist camp. Predictably, this has set it somewhat at odds with the prevailing currents of taste in Charlottesville. "The university's idea of a good building is more or less the opposite of what we teach," says one faculty member, W.G. Clark. "What they've been putting up year after year are mediocre buildings decked out in pseudo-Jeffersonian cladding. We try to attract graduate students and faculty to come here, and they look around and say, 'What era are you people living in?"'

Clark himself recently collaborated on a design to add new space to the architecture school, and Van Lengen pointed to it as an example of what the university ought to be building elsewhere. "He created panels on the facade that can flip down to serve as seminar tables — that's a Jeffersonian idea, and if you've been to Monticello, you know he'd love it," she said. The new additions also include faculty offices clustered around open porches and seminar rooms, an idea that Van Lengen said was inspired by Jefferson's campus design, what he famously called the "academical village," with its integration of student and faculty buildings. "We all love the Lawn here," she said. "We just love it in different ways."

"It's like the Pantheon, or Amiens cathedral, or the Kimbell museum — it's not something you can replicate," another faculty member, Ed Ford, told me. "If you build a copy of it next door, that will diminish the experience of the Lawn, not enhance it."

I thought back to the board meeting I'd attended, at which one member — Don Pippin, a retired lawyer from southwestern Virginia — summed up his side of the case in a few simple words. "Whenever we represent the university on a postcard, we show the Lawn," he said. "That's us — and that's Classical."

For all its tradition, the University of Virginia, more than most other institutions, suffers from a generation gap between its past and present selves. This is actually a result of its phenomenally successful transformation in the past few decades from a small, regionally-bound institution (where the first black undergraduate was admitted in 1955 and full coeducation arrived only in 1970) to a major research university with a $3 billion endowment and an increasingly diverse student body. Many of its older and wealthier alumni, then, are nostalgic for a jacket-and-tie Southern school that no longer quite exists. This is an especially salient point because Virginia draws only about 8 percent of its revenues from government subsidies far less than most other state schools. New building projects, particularly, need to be embraced by wealthy donors if they are ever to get off the drawing board.

When the idea of a major new addition to Jefferson's college was first proposed, in the late 1990's, it was referred to as "the Digital Academical Village," an awkward name that, in retrospect, may have heralded the difficulties to come. Then, after the tech bubble burst, the project was rebaptized the South Lawn — which harked back to the school's Jeffersonian roots (as well as to its traditional cultural orientation) without any embarrassing Al Gore-ish overtones.

The site chosen for this bucolic new campus looked, and still looks, nothing like a lawn. It begins on a steep hillside behind New Cabell Hall (slated for eventual demolition), continues across a busy road in Charlottesville and ends in a large parking lot — which sits some 40 vertical feet below the level of New Cabell. The topography was rendered yet more complicated by the presence of an underground stream and by the discovery of an unmarked African-American cemetery from the 19th century, which the university wants to preserve and commemorate as part of the new construction. Add the fact that all this is a stone's throw from a World Heritage site, and it was clear that the architects faced a formidable challenge.

James Polshek's solution, as at the Clinton library, was a bridge. Those in Charlottesville familiar with the design said that over successive drafts, the connector grew wider and wider until it became a football-field-size terrace spanning the road, which would pass beneath it. (Citing a confidentiality agreement signed with the university when their contract was terminated, Polshek and his staff declined to comment for this article, or to provide copies of their plans.) As for the buildings themselves, the designs remained sketchy in their details but included several boxy structures arranged asymmetrically around a grassy space. Although the new complex wouldn't be directly visible from the Lawn, it would nearly match it in scale — leading some to worry that it would detract from the dignity and centrality of Jefferson's structures.

Almost from the beginning, Polshek's plans came under fire for not being "traditional" enough. "There were a couple of strong-willed people on the board who really made that an issue, relentlessly," says Samuel A. Anderson III, the university's former architectural coordinator.

After years of quibbles and false starts — complicated further by what the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences called "our largest budget crisis since the Civil War" — Polshek resigned from the project last spring. This came as a surprise to his admirers, particularly given Polshek's reputation as easygoing and his record of building successfully in historically sensitive contexts. But a "strong sense of mutual fatigue" had set in, according to one college administrator, Adam Daniel, who had worked closely with the architect.

At the School of Architecture, Polshek's partisans saw his resignation (some rumors portrayed it as a dismissal) as a last straw. After rounds of angry e-mail messages, a group of them met in a lecture hall on campus to draft a manifesto, which they released to the press with 24 signatures. "What Are the Jeffersonian Architectural Ideals?" it was headlined, and went on to ask:

"Is the university committed to architectural excellence? . . .

"Is there not a difference between buildings that merely look Jeffersonian as opposed to the infinitely more difficult task of being Jeffersonian?. . .

"Is it desirable that a building built [today] be mistaken for one built in 1830? Is U.Va. to become a theme park of nostalgia at the service of the university's branding?. . ."

The administration offered no answers to these questions. But more and more faculty members, not all of them from the architecture school, added their names to the open letter, and their grievances spread far beyond the South Lawn. Many ridiculed the university's new $128 million basketball arena, decked out with a bombastic pergola of bloated Tuscan columns. Others focused their ire on the campus of the Darden School of Business, which Robert A.M. Stern designed in the 1990's as a rather literal copy of Jefferson's buildings on the Lawn — "a corporate office park version," as one professor called it. They pointed out that red brick and white pillars had not altogether happy historical connotations for the black students that the modern-day University of Virginia was competing hard to recruit.

One of the letter's authors created a Web site about the controversy, which soon filled up with comments from far beyond Charlottesville, many of them by self-appointed defenders of Jeffersonian neo-Classicism. Several dozen — including the New Urbanist pioneer Andres Duany and even a representative of Prince Charles's architecture foundation in London — took out a full-page ad in the campus newspaper for their own manifesto, which excoriated "the architecture school's modernists" and exhorted the administration to rededicate itself to "beauty, tradition and common sense."

All this, to be sure, was a reprise of a debate that had been going on for a long time. "The shade of Jefferson broods over Charlottesville," wrote one critic in the magazine Architectural Forum. "Misunderstood, embalmed by little minds in static thought, the revolutionist must turn forever in an angry grave. The grandeur of his University looks down at sycophants who ape his cornices at puny scale, forget his sense of space, and strive forever to repeat the form without the soul." That article appeared in 1934.

And as of 2006, after almost four years of work — as long as it took Jefferson to build nearly his entire academical village — the hypothetical South Lawn was still a hillside, a road and a parking lot.

"I find the argument juvenile," Robert A.M. Stern told me. If the critics on the architecture-school faculty, he added, "would spend their time actually studying Jefferson, the world would be a better place." And yet, he admitted, this hasn't kept him from following the whole thing closely — from the safe remove of his offices in New York and New Haven, where he is dean of the architecture school at Yale — via architects' listservs and the U.Va. student press. The godfather of postmodern architecture has been building at Virginia (among dozens of other colleges and universities) since the early 80's and currently has a project on the drawing board for the university's school of education.

Although the debate in Charlottesville might seem like a merely academic dust-up, Stern said that the questions it raises have a far larger significance. "One of the problems with modernism is that it is based on a kind of global solution to everything," he said. "And even though it's true that we live in an increasingly globalized society, we can't just go in and slam down the same buildings in Charlottesville that you would slam down in Istanbul. This isn't just about the University of Virginia — it's about the local and the global."

In designing the Darden School's campus a decade ago, Stern said, he tried to create a place where, "although nobody standing there thinks he's on the Lawn, anybody standing there knows he's at the University of Virginia."

Yet to some, including admirers of the Classical tradition, the Darden School is one of the worst abominations of recent campus architecture. "I find it deeply un-Jeffersonian," says Malcolm Bell III, a respected scholar of ancient Greek art and archaeology at the university. "It's really quite dreadful."

Indeed, even on a sunny spring day, there's something a little creepy about Darden. First, there's the sense of déjà vu. The "academical village" has been mimicked not just once, but on two sides of the building: in the front, where a Rotunda-like facade gazes out over rows of parked cars, and off one side, where an abbreviated version of the Lawn, flanked by monotonously identical pavilions instead of playfully varying ones, dead-ends in a bulldozed berm. The facades may look Classical, but they lack Jefferson's saving eccentricities; it is as if someone had run them off on an enormous photocopier. And whereas stepping onto Jefferson's Lawn feels, even for a visitor, somehow both ennobling and joyous all at once, Darden — its cyborg twin — intimidates.

What's the alternative? Many of the university's modernists point admiringly to Hereford College, a complex of undergraduate dorms designed in the 90's by the New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. "There's an engagement with the landscape and a compositional playfulness," says Daniel Bluestone, a professor of architectural history at the university. But I found Hereford, which is home to some 500 students, as depressing as Darden: an off-kilter arrangement of towering brick slabs, their slitlike windows resembling gun ports in World War II pillboxes. Unlike the Lawn, which on that same morning was full of students sunbathing and tossing Frisbees, the quad at Hereford was devoid of any life.

In fact, the more time I spent touring Virginia's campus beyond its Jeffersonian core, the more I found myself wishing impossibly that most of it would simply go away, leaving the Lawn in its pristine glory amid antebellum cornfields. Stern himself expressed almost the same thought when he told me that new buildings in a place like Charlottesville should meld seamlessly into what's already there: "It takes a great architect to wield an invisible hand. It's the third-rate clod who leaves his filthy fingerprints all over everything."

But is invisibility a desirable — let alone attainable — goal in architecture, especially for an institution that has grown from serving a couple of hundred students in the 1820's to more than 20,000 today? Jefferson's great gift to his university was starting to seem, in at least one sense, more like a curse.

Among the few places on the central grounds where I saw no effigy of the university's patron saint — no plaster bust, oil painting or handsomely framed print — was the high-ceilinged office of the school's president, John T. Casteen III. One of the few visible reminders of Jefferson is a modern edition of his papers on the bookshelf — a multivolume set, bound in dingy cloth and obviously well thumbed.

A solemn, doughfaced man — nothing equine about him — Casteen ducked the subject of Jefferson when we got to discussing architecture. Instead, he talked about vernacular Southern houses and the Pompidou Center, Jerusalem and Singapore. Finally, I cornered him: didn't he have any opinion on what kind of architecture his institution's founder would support if he were alive now?

"The truth is, I know Jefferson pretty well — probably better than most people here," he told me. As an undergraduate, Casteen worked as a clerk in the rare-book room of the university library, assisting scholars who were editing the great man's papers; he ended up reading more than 5,000 of Jefferson's letters straight from the original manuscripts. "If I learned one thing about his character, it's that he was unpredictable; he didn't play by normal rules. And he continually challenged the assumptions of his age."

The most remarkable thing about Jefferson's "academical village," his admirers like to point out, is how durable it has proved. Unlike most 200-year-old structures, it still serves its architect's original intent, as a community where students and professors live at close quarters, in the university's heart.

Unlike in the 19th century, however, when the Lawn sheltered the entire student body, today it is home to just a few dozen handpicked members of the senior class, who gamely put up with the lack of convenient indoor plumbing and the constant intrusions of visitors: tourists, alumni, prospective freshmen. A cynic might even say that the Jeffersonian core has become a kind of false shop window for the university; Charlottesville suffers from a shortage of student housing, and many more undergraduates end up in cramped off-campus apartments far from their classrooms. The community that Jefferson constructed has changed in other ways too: high-speed data cables run through the dirt-floored basements where slaves once lived.

In some ways, a more honest reflection of the present day is the newly opened undergraduate dining hall atop Observatory Hill, about half a mile away. Inside, a curvy staircase leads up to a tiled food court, surrounded by deluxe cafeteria stations, grills and sushi bars, each advertising itself on a brightly colored marquee: Old World. Upper Crust. Center Stage. Traditions. Innovations. Cravings.

Here in this found poetry, I think, is the heart and soul of the modern university. Its contradictions are the contradictions inherent in architecture as well. Our society expects its colleges (and its architects) to be both guardians of tradition and incubators of originality. We expect them to exalt individual genius but not offend the ordinary herd. We expect them to stand for both the old and the new. We expect them to be bravely independent yet obedient to our demands. And somehow, amid all these countervailing currents, we expect them to remain financially stable. No wonder it's so hard to build a halfway decent campus building anymore.

The college campus that I myself know best — Harvard's — is in some ways the opposite of Virginia's. Unlike the Lawn, its ancient Yard has developed through the years by a process of slow accretion: a stalwart Georgian relic here, a bit of Romanesque Revival there, a modernist folly by Le Corbusier sidling up along one edge. When I was an undergraduate there, I loved the sense of living amid a museum of three centuries of American architecture. Some buildings were closer to my heart than others, but I never thought of the new as detracting from the old. All, it seemed, were part of a continuing intellectual project; their variety was proof of its vitality.

When I spoke with Samuel Anderson, the University of Virginia's retired architectural coordinator, he spun this idea into an elegant simile. "I think of the buildings at a university as being like books in a well-loved family library," he said. "You can pull some novels down and say, 'I bought these in the 50's, when Cheever was big,' and then point to some travel books that your great-grandfather collected in the 1840's. I've been in houses where the people were newly wealthy and had libraries that had been assembled for them by someone else: all those perfect, new leather bindings. That's what I fear if a university builds new buildings that try to look old."

Early last month, I returned to Charlottesville to see the board vote on the latest version of the South Lawn plans. The project had been assigned to new architects from the California firm Moore Ruble Yudell, who had been working on it intensively for months — including long hours spent poring over copies of Jefferson's original architectural drawings.

This time, the meeting was held at the Darden School, in a room that resembled the banquet area of an airport hotel. Almost as soon as I arrived, it was clear that the new proposal was expected to win approval hands-down. Outside the conference room, Edward Ayers, the boyish dean of the college, was almost hopping with excitement as he anticipated taking the architect's model on the road to show prospective donors.

When the meeting of the board's buildings-and-grounds committee convened, the model sat in the center of the room. The new team of architects — led by John Ruble, himself a Virginia alumnus — kept Polshek's land bridge but reoriented its structures around a familiar scheme: two parallel rows of redbrick pavilions joined by colonnades, facing inward around a grassy quadrangle. At the head of the quad, just where the Rotunda would be, was a circular terrace with a granite fountain.

"We worked hard to give this building its own unique quality — while resonating with Jefferson," Ruble told me later. (Meanwhile, a professor at the architecture school who had seen the plans sent me a late-night e-mail message headed "The Newest South Lawn Debacle.")

Personally, I liked the way Ruble's design created an outdoor but intimate space for students and faculty while opening onto the fabled vista of the Piedmont. On the other hand, I also thought its white-column and redbrick details looked like a Marriott hotel version of neo-Classical architecture. They reminded me of a lot of the mediocre buildings constructed on many campuses, not just Virginia's, in recent years: "postmodern" pastiches of old and new, whose highest aspiration is to offend no one. I found myself thinking wistfully of missed opportunities a few weeks later, when I visited the newly reopened Morgan Library and Museum in New York, where Renzo Piano's glass-and-steel pavilion had enriched the historic brownstone and Beaux-Arts landmarks that flanked it — old jewels gleaming in a new setting.

In any case, Ruble's South Lawn design passed the board by a unanimous voice vote. As the meeting broke up, I approached John Casteen, who was lingering by the model. He liked it, he said. The fountain reminded him of something at the Pompidou Center. The buildings would admirably serve the needs of students, faculty and staff. The donors, too, would be satisfied. Then I asked Casteen if he thought the new design was suitably Jeffersonian.

"The only person I know who does Jeffersonian architecture," he said, "is Thomas Jefferson."

Adam Goodheart, the C.V. Starr scholar at Washington College in Chestertown, Md., writes frequently about American history.
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'Round the World

Sneakers Delight, a feast for the feet, on Rua do Norte in Lisbon's hip Bairro Alto neighborhood.

This article is SO me, interms of goals and means of achieving them, in terms of travel. Enjoy.

The New York Times
May 17, 2006
Frugal Traveler
My Goal Is to Go Around the World in 90 Days on the Cheap
By MATT GROSS

Back in 1872, it was easy to go around the world. When Phileas Fogg, the hero of Jules Verne's novel "Around the World in 80 Days," wanted to do it, he simply left his London club, went home to collect a few shirts and his servant, and caught the 8:45 p.m. express train to Dover. He was on his way.

Over the last month, as I prepared for my own summer trip around the word in 90 days — a journey I'll write about here every Wednesday until the deed is done — I often wished it were still the late 19th century, when gleaming new railroads and steamers carried one across the plains and oceans of a world that had, almost overnight, grown smaller.

Today, we have the advent of long-haul flights, airlines that'll fly you across Europe for a nickel, and Web sites that bring up limitless destinations in an instant. But Fogg needed none of that. His simple travel tools consisted of "Bradshaw's Continental Railway Steam Transit and General Guide" and an unshakable faith that "the unforeseen does not exist." Well, he also had £20,000 stuffed into a bag (the equivalent today, according to an Internet inflation calculator, of £1,190,053.40 or just under $2.3 million).

I did not have vast riches. I did not have a devoted French servant. And I did not have faith in airline timetables and the easy availability of hotel rooms and economy-class seats. What I did have were three months with no pressing engagements. So I jumped at the opportunity to write about the traveler's holy grail: the round-the-world voyage.

Every week, as I make my way eastward, I will be sharing travel tips, discussing the limits of ultra-discount airlines, exploring the concept of Slow Travel and, if I'm lucky, discovering a microscopic town or burgeoning metropolis with untapped vacation potential. I'll seek stylish shoes in Barcelona and fine wines in Georgia, and delve into the logistics of yurt camping in Mongolia. Whether I succeed will depend in part on your feedback: so post your tips, comments and theories, and I'll test them out there in the real world.

Some guidelines first. Circling the globe presents an seemingly infinite number of travel options, and narrowing them down requires one to be patient, open-minded and occasionally arbitrary. I am beginning in the Mediterranean because it's summer and I want to go to the beach. Odessa is also on my list, precisely because I had heard little about it except that it's a hot party zone. And while I went to Shanghai last year, that city struck me as so fast-moving that I couldn't wait to see how it's changed in the intervening months.

But the real challenge is not in choosing the route but in accomplishing the journey as the Frugal Traveler. Though my travels might take me to some of the wealthiest corners of the globe like Monaco, my budget is limited: for lodging, free if possible, with a $100 cap per night; and for meals, $40. Like Phileas Fogg, who embarked on the voyage to show it could be done (and to win a £20,000 bet), I too had something to prove: that it doesn't take a sack full of cash to live the high life.

Unfortunately, as I shopped for around-the-word fares, I began to get discouraged. The cheapest circuits, like the $1,379 fare from Around-the-World.com, weaved through cities like London, Paris and Bangkok — well-worn destinations that offered little in the way of real adventure.

Next, I tried at Airtreks.com, which specializes in round-the-world trips. Its online trip planner lets you plot every point on your journey, including obscure places like Thessaloniki, Greece, and Peshawar, Pakistan, as well as segments you want to make overland. But the price was too high: my proposed itinerary would have cost about $5,800.

Then I turned to my favorite hobby: entering unusual airport codes on Kayak.com, whose stripped-down design and inclusion of lesser-known carriers (Uzbekistan Yullary, anyone?) never fail to impress me. I put together a quick itinerary that started from Newark, with eastward stops in Lisbon, Istanbul, Tashkent, Beijing, Shanghai, Ulaan Baatar and San Francisco. The price wasn't bad — $3,370 — but I knew it wouldn't hold up to the vagaries of online booking.

And yet ....

What if I heard about an amazing spot that didn't fit into my pre-set itinerary? What if the Uzbek consulate rejected my tourist visa application? What if the beaches of Croatia are nicer than I had imagined, and I wanted to spend an extra day?

In the end, I decided to buy only the first and last segments of the trip — Newark-Lisbon on May 11, which I purchased for $547 through TAP Portugal's Web site, and Beijing-San Francisco on Aug. 11, for $898.67. To get from Point A to Point A, I would hopscotch the globe using low-cost carriers, buses, trains, ferries and serendipity. Or at least that's the plan. Like Phileas Fogg, I set off without a second thought last Thursday.

Which is how I came to find myself in Lisbon last weekend, in the hip Bairro Alto neighborhood with my friend Michele, an American who's lived there a decade, and his friend Margarita. Despite my jetlag, we were drinking outdoors on Rua da Bica Duarte Belo. Lisbon's coolest were out in full force.

"Look at this guy," Michele said, nodding at a Lisboete in his mid-20's, with dark hair, dark eyes and a week's growth of beard. "He's so Portuguese. They're all so Portuguese! They all look like they could've been 16th-century explorers."

Indeed, Lisbon seems to have been designed for and by explorers. A discovery lurks around every corner, whether it's a peaceful pocket park, a glittering view of the Tagus or just the irresistible scent of roasted chicken from a takeout joint. I would spend the next two days wandering those back alleys, getting lost in the way that one only can in old European cities.

Besides, I was running low on money. I wanted to splurge on my first night, so we ended up at Farta Brutos, an old-school restaurant where the dorado comes perfectly grilled and the motherly waitress shoots you disapproving looks if you don't finish everything on your plate. Dinner set me back 25 euros. Sticking to my daily meal allowance of about 30 euros will be tough. The next day, I settled for a cafeteria lunch of salad and quiche for 7.50 euros. Luckily, a friend recommended the Hotel Lisboa in the city's center. The room was small, but it was only 55 euros a night.

Before I departed Lisbon, I paid homage to Portugal's adventurers by visiting the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, a 500-year-old monastery where seamen would make their last confessions before sailing off — unforeseen be damned! — to the edge of the world. The sun was out, and the monastery's pale Manueline spires stood out against the clear sky. Better yet, because it was Sunday, entrance was free (at least till 2 p.m.).

I walked into the chapel, where a choir was singing and parishioners were shushing tourists. Just to the left was the tomb of Vasco da Gama, who had sailed from Lisbon to India at the dawn of the 16th century. Above the tomb lay his statue, hands clasped, a garland of fresh flowers below his heavily bearded chin. He looked, I thought, like someone I'd want to have a drink with.

Next week: Galicia.

Have you been to Galicia? Share your tips with the Frugal Traveler. | Read comments.
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Light hearted

Gotta love this stuff. If physics were made this interesting in school, we'd be a nation of scientists. Enjoy.

The New York Times
May 16, 2006
Impressive New Tricks of Light, All Within the Laws of Physics
By KENNETH CHANG

To make light go backward, hold up a mirror. Light bounces off the mirror and goes back.

Robert W. Boyd, a professor of optics at the University of Rochester, however, did not choose this easy, straightforward technique.

Instead, in the latest example of logic-defying tricks that physicists can now perform with light, Dr. Boyd and his colleagues demonstrated an optical fiber — a glass strand that transmits pulses of light — with a couple of odd characteristics:

¶A pulse of light shot into the fiber departs before it enters.

¶Within the fiber, the pulse travels backward — and faster than the speed of light.

Perhaps most amazingly, Dr. Boyd's results do not violate any law of physics. The effect is indeed predicted by the equations describing the propagation of waves.

"This is a good example of something which is very counterintuitive that the laws of nature permit," Dr. Boyd said.

An article describing the experiment appears in the current issue of the journal Science.

In the vacuum of space, light travels at a constant 186,282 miles per second. When it passes through a transparent material like glass or water, it slows slightly, in effect bouncing off atoms as it moves.

In 1999, physicists led by Lene Vestergaard Hau of Harvard slowed the speed of light to a leisurely 38 miles per hour by shining it into an exotic ultracooled material known as Bose-Einstein condensate.

Two years later, Dr. Hau's group, as well as a second team of scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, were able to bring light to a standstill — and then release it with its original properties intact.

In other experiments, scientists have shown that it is possible to make light at least appear as if it is traveling faster than the speed of light. Physicists hope to harness such manipulations of light to speed up optical communications.

For Dr. Boyd's trick, the scientists used an optical fiber of glass with small amounts of the metal erbium, which acts as an amplifier. In the experiment, a pulse of laser light was fired into the fiber. Even before the peak of the pulse entered the fiber, another pulse appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, at the far end of the fiber.

This new pulse then split in two. One, a twin of the original pulse, moved forward, while the other moved backward through the fiber.

The backward pulse, which traveled faster than the speed of light, and the original pulse met at the front end of the fiber, where they canceled each other.

Even though one pulse momentarily became three, the experiment did not violate the law mandating conservation of energy because the amplifying effect of the erbium added a temporary surge of energy.

At first glance, the experiment appears to flout the usual speed limit on the transmission of signals as the original pulse jumped to the forward-moving pulse on the other side of the fiber.

However, the pulses were in a shape known as Gaussian, which is, in principle, infinite in width, though in practice not quite that wide.

Thus, the outgoing pulse was actually just part of the original pulse that was reshaped by the fiber's unusual properties.

"It's really kind of showing the kind of manipulation of light we can do these days," Dr. Hau said of Dr. Boyd's experiment.

Dr. Boyd said this effect might find some application in speeding up optical communications, but it is, for now, mostly just an impressive trick of physics. "I find it neat," he said. "I find it nifty."
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The Best

I feel that this article makes persuasive arguments about several things - enjoy.

Essay
In Search of the Best
By A. O. SCOTT

More than a century ago, Frank Norris wrote that "the Great American Novel is not extinct like the dodo, but mythical like the hippogriff," an observation that Philip Roth later used as the epigraph for a spoofy 1973 baseball fantasia called, naturally, "The Great American Novel." It pointedly isn't - no one counts it among Roth's best novels, though what books people do place in that category will turn out to be relevant to our purpose here, which has to do with the eternal hunt for Norris's legendary beast. The hippogriff, a monstrous hybrid of griffin and horse, is often taken as the very symbol of fantastical impossibility, a unicorn's unicorn. But the Great American Novel, while also a hybrid (crossbred of romance and reportage, high philosophy and low gossip, wishful thinking and hard-nosed skepticism), may be more like the yeti or the Loch Ness monster - or sasquatch, if we want to keep things homegrown. It is, in other words, a creature that quite a few people - not all of them certifiably crazy, some of them bearing impressive documentation - claim to have seen. The Times Book Review, ever wary of hoaxes but always eager to test the boundary between empirical science and folk superstition, has commissioned a survey of recent sightings.

Or something like that. Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." The results - in some respects quite surprising, in others not at all - provide a rich, if partial and unscientific, picture of the state of American literature, a kind of composite self-portrait as interesting perhaps for its blind spots and distortions as for its details.

And as interesting, in some cases, for the reasoning behind the choices as for the choices themselves. Tanenhaus's request, simple and innocuous enough at first glance, turned out in many cases to be downright treacherous. It certainly provoked a lot of other questions in response, both overt and implicit. "What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose?" Gertrude Stein once asked, and the question "what is the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years?" invites a similar scrutiny of basic categories and assumptions. Nothing is as simple as it looks. What do we mean, in an era of cultural as well as economic globalization, by "American"? Or, in the age of James Frey, reality television and phantom W.M.D.'s, what do we mean by "fiction"? And if we know what American fiction is, then what do we mean by "best"?

A tough question, and one that a number of potential respondents declined to answer, some silently, others with testy eloquence. There were those who sighed that they could not possibly select one book to place at the summit of an edifice with so many potential building blocks - they hadn't read everything, after all - and also those who railed against the very idea of such a monument. One famous novelist, unwilling to vote for his own books and reluctant to consider anyone else's, asked us to "assume you never heard from me."

More common was the worry that our innocent inquiry, by feeding the deplorable modern mania for ranking, list-making and fabricated competition, would not only distract from the serious business of literature but, worse, subject it to damaging trivialization. To consecrate one work as the best - or even to establish a short list of near-bests - would be to risk the implication that no one need bother with the rest, and thus betray the cause of reading. The determination of literary merit, it was suggested, should properly be a matter of reasoned judgment and persuasive argument, not mass opinionizing. Criticism should not cede its prickly, qualitative prerogatives to the quantifying urges of sociology or market research.

Fair enough. But there would be no point in proposing such a contest unless it would be met with quarrels and complaints. (A few respondents, not content to state their own preferences, pre-emptively attacked what they assumed would be the thinking of the majority. So we received some explanations of why people were not voting for "Beloved," the expected winner, and also one Roth fan's assertion that the presumptive preference for "American Pastoral" over "Operation Shylock" was self-evidently mistaken.) Even in cases - the majority - where the premise of the research was accepted, problems of method and definition buzzed around like persistent mosquitoes. There were writers who, finding themselves unable to isolate just one candidate, chose an alternate, or submitted a list. The historical and ethical parameters turned out to be blurry, since the editor's initial letter had not elaborated on them. Could you vote for yourself? Of course you could: amour-propre is as much an entitlement of the literary class as log-rolling, which means you could also vote for a friend, a lover, a client or a colleague. But could you vote for, say, "A Confederacy of Dunces," which, though published in 1980, was written around 20 years earlier? A tricky issue of what scholars call periodization: is John Kennedy Toole's ragged New Orleans farce a lost classic of the 60's, to be shelved alongside countercultural picaresques like Richard Fariña's "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me"? Or is it a premonition of the urban-comic 80's zeitgeist in which it finally landed, keeping company with, say, Jay McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City"? What about story collections - I. B. Singer's, Donald Barthelme's, Raymond Carver's, for instance - that appeared between 1980 and 2005 but gathered up the work of earlier decades? Do they qualify? And - most consequentially, as it happened - what about John Updike's four "Rabbit" novels? Only the last two were published during the period in question, but all four were bound into a single volume and published, by Everyman's Library, in 1995. Considered separately, "Rabbit Is Rich" (1981) and "Rabbit at Rest" (1990) might have split Updike's vote, which "Rabbit Angstrom" was able to consolidate, placing it in the top five. If Nathan Zuckerman had received a similar omnibus reissue, with "The Counterlife," "The Human Stain," "American Pastoral" and the others squeezed into one fat tome, literary history as we know it - or at least this issue of the Book Review - would be entirely different.

THE question "what do you mean by 'the last 25 years'?" in any case turned out to be a live one, and surveying the recent past caused a few minds to wander farther back in time. One best-selling author (whose fat novels seem to have been campaigning for inclusion in this issue long before the editors dreamed it up, even though not even he bothered to vote for any of them) reflected on the poverty of our current literary situation by wondering what the poll might have looked like in 1940, with Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald - to say nothing of Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis - in its lustrous purview. The last time this kind of survey was conducted, in 1965 (under the auspices of Book Week, the literary supplement of the soon-to-be-defunct New York Herald Tribune), the winner was Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," which was declared "the most memorable" work of American fiction published since the end of World War II, and the most likely to endure. The field back then included "The Adventures of Augie March," "Herzog," "Lolita," "Catch-22," "Naked Lunch," "The Naked and the Dead" and (I'll insist if no one else will) "The Group." In the gap between that survey and this one is a decade and a half - the unsurveyed territory from 1965 to 1980 - that includes Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" and William Gaddis's "JR," as well as "Humboldt's Gift," "Portnoy's Complaint," "Ragtime," "Song of Solomon" and countless others.

Contemplation of such glories lent an inevitable undercurrent of nostalgia to some of the responses. Where are the hippogriffs of yesteryear? Could they have been dodos all along? Not to worry: late-20th-century American Lit comprises a bustling menagerie, like Noah's ark or the island of Dr. Moreau, where modernists and postmodernists consort with fabulists and realists, ghost stories commingle with domestic dramas, and historical pageantry mutates into metafiction. It is, gratifyingly if also bewilderingly, a messy and multitudinous affair.

It is perhaps this babble and ruckus - the polite word is diversity - that breeds the impulse of which Sam Tanenhaus's question is an expression: the urge to isolate, in the midst of it all, a single, comprehensive masterpiece. E pluribus unum, as it were. We - Americans, writers, American writers - seem often to be a tribe of mavericks dreaming of consensus. Our mythical book is the one that will somehow include everything, at once reflecting and by some linguistic magic dissolving our intractable divisions and stubborn imperfections. The American literary tradition is relatively young, and it stands in perpetual doubt of its own coherence and adequacy - even, you might say, of its own existence. Such anxiety fosters large, even utopian ambitions. A big country demands big books. To ask for the best work of American fiction, therefore, is not simply - or not really - to ask for the most beautifully written or the most enjoyable to read. We all have our personal favorites, but I suspect that something other than individual taste underwrites most of the choices here. The best works of fiction, according to our tally, appear to be those that successfully assume a burden of cultural importance. They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the nation itself. America is not only their setting, but also their subject.

They are - the top five, in any case, in ascending order - "American Pastoral," with 7 votes; Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" and Updike's four-in-one "Rabbit Angstrom," tied with 8 votes each; "Don DeLillo's "Underworld," with 11; and, solidly ahead of the rest, Toni Morrison's "Beloved," with 15. (If these numbers seem small, keep in mind that they are drawn from only 125 votes, and from a pool of potential candidates equal to the number of books of fiction by American writers published in 25 years. Sometimes cultural significance can be counted on the fingers of one hand.)

Any other outcome would have been startling, since Morrison's novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals. With remarkable speed, "Beloved" has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. This triumph is commensurate with its ambition, since it was Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living black woman, the company of dead white males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain. When the book first began to be assigned in college classrooms, during an earlier and in retrospect much tamer phase of the culture wars, its inclusion on syllabuses was taken, by partisans and opponents alike, as a radical gesture. (The conservative canard one heard in those days was that left-wing professors were casting aside Shakespeare in favor of Morrison.) But the political rhetoric of the time obscured the essential conservatism of the novel, which aimed not to displace or overthrow its beloved precursors, but to complete and to some extent correct them.

It is worth remarking that the winner of the 1965 Book Week poll, Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," arose from a similar impulse to bring the historical experience of black Americans, and the expressive traditions this experience had produced, into the mainstream of American literature. Or, rather, to reveal that it had been there all along, and that race, far from being a special or marginal concern, was a central facet of the American story. On the evidence of Ellison's and Morrison's work, it is also a part of the story that defies the tenets of realism, or at least demands that they be combined with elements of allegory, folk tale, Gothic and romance.

The American masterpieces of the mid-19th century - "Moby-Dick," "The Scarlet Letter," the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and, for that matter, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" - were compounded of precisely these elements, and nowadays it seems almost impossible to write about that period without crossing into the realm of the supernatural, or at least the self-consciously mythic. This is surely what ties "Beloved" to "Blood Meridian." Both novels treat primordial situations of American violence - slavery and its aftermath in one case, the conquest of the Southwestern frontier in the other - in compressed, lyrical language that rises at times to archaic, epic strangeness. Some of their power - and much of their originality - arises from the feeling that they are uncovering ancient tales, rendering scraps of a buried oral tradition in literary form.

But the recovery of the past - especially the more recent past - turns out to be the dominant concern of American writing, at least as reflected in this survey, over the past quarter-century. Our age is retrospective. One obvious difference between "Invisible Man" and "Beloved," for instance, is that Ellison's book, even as it flashes back to the Depression-era South and the Harlem of the 1940's, plants itself in the present and leans forward, to the point of risking prophecy. "Beloved," in contrast, concerns itself with the recovery of origins, the isolation of a primal trauma whose belated healing will be undertaken by the narrative itself. And while "Blood Meridian" is far too gnomic and nihilistic to claim such a therapeutic function for itself, it nonetheless shares with "Beloved" a vision of the past as an alien realm of extremity, in which human relations are stripped to the bare essentials of brutality and tenderness, vengeance and honor.

In some ways, the mode of fiction McCarthy and Morrison practice is less historical than pre-historical. It does not involve the reconstruction of earlier times - the collisions between real and invented characters, the finicky attention to manners, customs and habits of speech - that usually defines the genre. But to look again at the top five titles in the survey is to discover just how heavily the past lies on the minds of contemporary writers and literary opinion makers. To the extent that the novel can say something about where we are and where we are going, the American novel at present chooses to do so above all by examining where we started and how we got here.

IF "Beloved" and "Blood Meridian" pull us back to a premodern American scene - a place that exists beyond realism and in some respects before civilization as we know it - the other three novels trace the more recent ups and downs of that civilization. Indeed, it is only a small exaggeration to say that "Underworld," "American Pastoral" and "Rabbit Angstrom" are variations on the same novel, a decades-spanning tale rooted in the old cities of the Eastern Seaboard. Needless to say, the methods, the characters and the voices are quite distinct - no one would mistake Roth for DeLillo or Updike for Roth - but these are differences of perspective, as if three painters were viewing the same town from neighboring hillsides.

The three novels do what we seem to want novels to do, which is to blend private destinies with public events, an exercise that the postwar proliferation of media simultaneously makes more urgent and more difficult. Rabbit Angstrom, high school basketball star, typesetter-turned-car-dealer, as carelessly loyal to his country as he is unfaithful to his wife, is an incarnation of the American ordinary made exemplary by the grace of God and of Updike's prose. Especially in the later novels, his consciousness becomes the prism through which the unsettled experience of the nation is refracted. The war in Vietnam, the racial agitations of the 60's, the moon landing, the Carter-era malaise, the end of the cold war: all of these are filtered through Rabbit's complacent gaze. So are less dramatic but no less consequential shifts in manners and morals, in taste and sensibility. Food, sex, cars, real estate, social class, religion - everything changes from "Rabbit, Run" to "Rabbit at Rest," even as the deep continuities of American life, embodied in the hero's transcendent laziness, appear to triumph in the end.

"Rabbit Angstrom" is not, strictly speaking, a novel of retrospect; it was written in the present tense and in real time, each segment composed before the end of the story could be known. Because of this - because Updike's gift for observing the present has always outstripped his ability to animate the past - "Rabbit," like the great Russian and French realist novels of the 19th century, becomes an unequaled repository of historical detail. Next to it, Updike's attempted multigenerational chronicle of 20th-century American history, "In the Beauty of the Lilies," looks thin and stagy.

Alongside Rabbit there is Zuckerman, his near contemporary, and like him the product of a small, industrial mid-Atlantic city. More pointedly, perhaps, there is Swede Levov, the hero of "American Pastoral" (Zuckerman being the self-effacing narrator), who is, like Rabbit, a star athlete in high school and whose nickname curiously recalls Rabbit's ethnic background. But while Rabbit is, for all the suffering he endures and inflicts, a fundamentally comic character, his destiny arcing toward happiness, Swede's trajectory is tragic. Fate has raised him high in order to see how far he might fall. He contains traces of Job - his fidelity to America tested by brutal and arbitrary misfortune - and also of Lear, snakebit by one of the most floridly and obscenely ungrateful children in all of literature.

The agonized question that ripples through "American Pastoral" is "what happened?" How did the pastoral America of Newark in the 40's and 50's - an Eden only in retrospect - come apart? And its selection over Roth's other books is indicative of how important this question is taken to be. Over the past 15 years, Roth's production has been so steady, so various and (mostly) so excellent that his vote has been, inevitably, split. If we had asked for the single best writer of fiction over the past 25 years, he would have won, with seven different books racking up a total of 21 votes. Within these numbers is an interesting schism. The loose trilogy of which "American Pastoral" is the first installment - "I Married a Communist" and "The Human Stain" are its companions - accounts for 11 votes, while 8 are divided among "Sabbath's Theater," "The Counterlife" and "Operation Shylock," and another 2 go to "The Plot Against America." The Roth whose primary concern is the past - the elegiac, summarizing, conservative Roth - is preferred over his more aesthetically radical, restless, present-minded doppelgänger by a narrow but decisive margin.

A similar split occurs among DeLillo's partisans, who favor the historical inquiry of "Underworld" over the contemporaneity of "White Noise." (There were also two voters who chose "Libra," a more narrowly focused historical fiction and in some ways a rehearsal for "Underworld.") Like "American Pastoral," "Underworld" is a chronologically fractured story drawn by a powerful nostalgic undertow back to the redolent streets of a postwar Eastern city. Baseball and the atom bomb, J. Edgar Hoover and the science of waste disposal are pulled into its vortex, but whereas Updike and Roth work to establish connection and coherence in the face of time's chaos, DeLillo is an artist of diffusion and dispersal, of implication and missing information. But more than his other books, "Underworld" is concerned with roots, in particular with ethnicity. Nick Shay, at first glance another one of his tight-lipped, deracinated postmodern drifters, turns out to be a half-Italian kid from the old East Bronx, and the characteristic rhythms of DeLillo's prose - the curious noun-verb inversions, the quick switches from abstraction to earthiness, from the decorous to the profane - are shown to arise, as surely as Roth's do, from the polyglot idiom of the old neighborhood.

So the top five American novels are concerned with history, with origins, to some extent with nostalgia. They are also the work of a single generation. DeLillo, born in 1936, is the youngest of the five leading authors. The others were born within two years of one another: Morrison in 1931, Updike in 1932, Roth and McCarthy in 1933.

Their seniority, needless to say, is earned - they have had plenty of time to ripen and grow - but it is nonetheless startling to see how thoroughly American writing is dominated by this generation. Startling in part because it reveals that the baby boom, long ascendant in popular culture and increasingly so in politics and business, has not produced a great novel. The best writers born immediately after the war seem almost programmatically to disdain the grand, synthesizing ambitions of their elders (and also some of their juniors), trafficking in irony, diffidence and the cultivation of small quirks rather than large idiosyncrasies. Only two books whose authors were born just after the war received more than two votes: "Housekeeping," by Marilynne Robinson, and "The Things They Carried," by Tim O'Brien. These are brilliant books, but they are also careful, small and precise. They do not generalize; they document. Ann Beattie, born in 1947, is among the most gifted and prolific fiction writers of her generation, but her books are nowhere to be found on this list; not, I would venture, because she fails to live up to the survey's implicit criterion of importance, but because she steadfastly refuses to try.

Expand beyond the immediate parameters of this exercise, and the generational discrepancy grows even more acute: add Thomas Pynchon and E. L. Doctorow, Anne Tyler and Cynthia Ozick, John Irving and Joan Didion and Russell Banks and Joyce Carol Oates and you will have a literary pantheon born almost to a person during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Further expansion - by means of a Wolfe here, a Mailer there - is likely to push the median age still higher. Think back on that 1965 survey; it's hard to find an author on the list of potential candidates much older than 50.

IS this quantitative evidence for the decline of American letters - yet another casualty of the 60's? Or is the American literary establishment the last redoubt of elder-worship in a culture mad for youth? In sifting through the responses, I was surprised at how few of the highly praised, boldly ambitious books by younger writers - by which I mean writers under 50 - were mentioned. One vote each for "The Corrections" and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," none for "Infinite Jest" or "The Fortress of Solitude," a single vote for Richard Powers, none for William T. Vollmann, and so on.

But the thing about mythical beasts is that they don't go extinct; they evolve. The best American fiction of the past 25 years is concerned, perhaps inordinately, with sorting out the past, which may be its way of clearing ground for the literature of the future. So let me end with a message to all you aspiring hippogriff breeders out there: 2030 is just around the corner. Get to work.

A. O. Scott is a film critic at The Times. He is writing a book on the American novel since World War II.

books

Nothing has affected me more than books. Enjoy.

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

May 14, 2006
Scan This Book!
By KEVIN KELLY

Correction Appended

In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

Until now. When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. Indeed, the explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade, has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?

Brewster Kahle, an archivist overseeing another scanning project, says that the universal library is now within reach. "This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!" he shouts. "It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon." And unlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person.

But the technology that will bring us a planetary source of all written material will also, in the same gesture, transform the nature of what we now call the book and the libraries that hold them. The universal library and its "books" will be unlike any library or books we have known. Pushing us rapidly toward that Eden of everything, and away from the paradigm of the physical paper tome, is the hot technology of the search engine.

1. Scanning the Library of Libraries

Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone — the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.

This is a very big library. But because of digital technology, you'll be able to reach inside it from almost any device that sports a screen. From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn't plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what's taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

Technology accelerates the migration of all we know into the universal form of digital bits. Nikon will soon quit making film cameras for consumers, and Minolta already has: better think digital photos from now on. Nearly 100 percent of all contemporary recorded music has already been digitized, much of it by fans. About one-tenth of the 500,000 or so movies listed on the Internet Movie Database are now digitized on DVD. But because of copyright issues and the physical fact of the need to turn pages, the digitization of books has proceeded at a relative crawl. At most, one book in 20 has moved from analog to digital. So far, the universal library is a library without many books.

But that is changing very fast. Corporations and libraries around the world are now scanning about a million books per year. Amazon has digitized several hundred thousand contemporary books. In the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford University (one of the five libraries collaborating with Google) is scanning its eight-million-book collection using a state-of-the art robot from the Swiss company 4DigitalBooks. This machine, the size of a small S.U.V., automatically turns the pages of each book as it scans it, at the rate of 1,000 pages per hour. A human operator places a book in a flat carriage, and then pneumatic robot fingers flip the pages — delicately enough to handle rare volumes — under the scanning eyes of digital cameras.

Like many other functions in our global economy, however, the real work has been happening far away, while we sleep. We are outsourcing the scanning of the universal library. Superstar, an entrepreneurial company based in Beijing, has scanned every book from 900 university libraries in China. It has already digitized 1.3 million unique titles in Chinese, which it estimates is about half of all the books published in the Chinese language since 1949. It costs $30 to scan a book at Stanford but only $10 in China.

Raj Reddy, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, decided to move a fair-size English-language library to where the cheap subsidized scanners were. In 2004, he borrowed 30,000 volumes from the storage rooms of the Carnegie Mellon library and the Carnegie Library and packed them off to China in a single shipping container to be scanned by an assembly line of workers paid by the Chinese. His project, which he calls the Million Book Project, is churning out 100,000 pages per day at 20 scanning stations in India and China. Reddy hopes to reach a million digitized books in two years.

The idea is to seed the bookless developing world with easily available texts. Superstar sells copies of books it scans back to the same university libraries it scans from. A university can expand a typical 60,000-volume library into a 1.3 million-volume one overnight. At about 50 cents per digital book acquired, it's a cheap way for a library to increase its collection. Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe's e-publishing business, says: "Some of us have thousands of books at home, can walk to wonderful big-box bookstores and well-stocked libraries and can get Amazon.com to deliver next day. The most dramatic effect of digital libraries will be not on us, the well-booked, but on the billions of people worldwide who are underserved by ordinary paper books." It is these underbooked — students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in Peru — whose lives will be transformed when even the simplest unadorned version of the universal library is placed in their hands.

2. What Happens When Books Connect

The least important, but most discussed, aspects of digital reading have been these contentious questions: Will we give up the highly evolved technology of ink on paper and instead read on cumbersome machines? Or will we keep reading our paperbacks on the beach? For now, the answer is yes to both. Yes, publishers have lost millions of dollars on the long-prophesied e-book revolution that never occurred, while the number of physical books sold in the world each year continues to grow. At the same time, there are already more than a half a billion PDF documents on the Web that people happily read on computers without printing them out, and still more people now spend hours watching movies on microscopic cellphone screens. The arsenal of our current display technology — from handheld gizmos to large flat screens — is already good enough to move books to their next stage of evolution: a full digital scan.

Yet the common vision of the library's future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination. In this vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability — the nifty translation of a book's full text into bits, which permits it to be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: in the universal library, no book will be an island.

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic amateurs have written and cross-referenced an entire online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. Buoyed by this success, many nerds believe that a billion readers can reliably weave together the pages of old books, one hyperlink at a time. Those with a passion for a special subject, obscure author or favorite book will, over time, link up its important parts. Multiply that simple generous act by millions of readers, and the universal library can be integrated in full, by fans for fans.

In addition to a link, which explicitly connects one word or sentence or book to another, readers will also be able to add tags, a recent innovation on the Web but already a popular one. A tag is a public annotation, like a keyword or category name, that is hung on a file, page, picture or song, enabling anyone to search for that file. For instance, on the photo-sharing site Flickr, hundreds of viewers will "tag" a photo submitted by another user with their own simple classifications of what they think the picture is about: "goat," "Paris," "goofy," "beach party." Because tags are user-generated, when they move to the realm of books, they will be assigned faster, range wider and serve better than out-of-date schemes like the Dewey Decimal System, particularly in frontier or fringe areas like nanotechnology or body modification.

The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years. They get their initial wave of power when we first code them into bits of text, but their real transformative energies fire up as ordinary users click on them in the course of everyday Web surfing, unaware that each humdrum click "votes" on a link, elevating its rank of relevance. You may think you are just browsing, casually inspecting this paragraph or that page, but in fact you are anonymously marking up the Web with bread crumbs of attention. These bits of interest are gathered and analyzed by search engines in order to strengthen the relationship between the end points of every link and the connections suggested by each tag. This is a type of intelligence common on the Web, but previously foreign to the world of books.

Once a book has been integrated into the new expanded library by means of this linking, its text will no longer be separate from the text in other books. For instance, today a serious nonfiction book will usually have a bibliography and some kind of footnotes. When books are deeply linked, you'll be able to click on the title in any bibliography or any footnote and find the actual book referred to in the footnote. The books referenced in that book's bibliography will themselves be available, and so you can hop through the library in the same way we hop through Web links, traveling from footnote to footnote to footnote until you reach the bottom of things.

Next come the words. Just as a Web article on, say, aquariums, can have some of its words linked to definitions of fish terms, any and all words in a digitized book can be hyperlinked to other parts of other books. Books, including fiction, will become a web of names and a community of ideas.

Search engines are transforming our culture because they harness the power of relationships, which is all links really are. There are about 100 billion Web pages, and each page holds, on average, 10 links. That's a trillion electrified connections coursing through the Web. This tangle of relationships is precisely what gives the Web its immense force. The static world of book knowledge is about to be transformed by the same elevation of relationships, as each page in a book discovers other pages and other books. Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together. The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can't see in a single, isolated book.

When books are digitized, reading becomes a community activity. Bookmarks can be shared with fellow readers. Marginalia can be broadcast. Bibliographies swapped. You might get an alert that your friend Carl has annotated a favorite book of yours. A moment later, his links are yours. In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world's only book.

3. Books: The Liquid Version

At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or "playlists," as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual "bookshelves" — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these "bookshelves" will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages. The ability to purchase, read and manipulate individual pages or sections is surely what will drive reference books (cookbooks, how-to manuals, travel guides) in the future. You might concoct your own "cookbook shelf" of Cajun recipes compiled from many different sources; it would include Web pages, magazine clippings and entire Cajun cookbooks. Amazon currently offers you a chance to publish your own bookshelves (Amazon calls them "listmanias") as annotated lists of books you want to recommend on a particular esoteric subject. And readers are already using Google Book Search to round up minilibraries on a certain topic — all books about Sweden, for instance, or books on clocks. Once snippets, articles and pages of books become ubiquitous, shuffle-able and transferable, users will earn prestige and perhaps income for curating an excellent collection.

Libraries (as well as many individuals) aren't eager to relinquish ink-on-paper editions, because the printed book is by far the most durable and reliable backup technology we have. Printed books require no mediating device to read and thus are immune to technological obsolescence. Paper is also extremely stable, compared with, say, hard drives or even CD's. In this way, the stability and fixity of a bound book is a blessing. It sits there unchanging, true to its original creation. But it sits alone.

So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four things: First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now. Far out in the "long tail" of the distribution curve — that extended place of low-to-no sales where most of the books in the world live — digital interlinking will lift the readership of almost any title, no matter how esoteric. Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don't know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.

Finally, the full, complete universal library of all works becomes more than just a better Ask Jeeves. Search on the Web becomes a new infrastructure for entirely new functions and services. Right now, if you mash up Google Maps and Monster.com, you get maps of where jobs are located by salary. In the same way, it is easy to see that in the great library, everything that has ever been written about, for example, Trafalgar Square in London could be present on that spot via a screen. In the same way, every object, event or location on earth would "know" everything that has ever been written about it in any book, in any language, at any time. From this deep structuring of knowledge comes a new culture of interaction and participation.

The main drawback of this vision is a big one. So far, the universal library lacks books. Despite the best efforts of bloggers and the creators of the Wikipedia, most of the world's expertise still resides in books. And a universal library without the contents of books is no universal library at all.

There are dozens of excellent reasons that books should quickly be made part of the emerging Web. But so far they have not been, at least not in great numbers. And there is only one reason: the hegemony of the copy.

4. The Triumph of the Copy

The desire of all creators is for their works to find their way into all minds. A text, a melody, a picture or a story succeeds best if it is connected to as many ideas and other works as possible. Ideally, over time a work becomes so entangled in a culture that it appears to be inseparable from it, in the way that the Bible, Shakespeare's plays, "Cinderella" and the Mona Lisa are inseparable from ours. This tendency for creative ideas to infiltrate other works is great news for culture. In fact, this commingling of creations is culture.

In preindustrial times, exact copies of a work were rare for a simple reason: it was much easier to make your own version of a creation than to duplicate someone else's exactly. The amount of energy and attention needed to copy a scroll exactly, word for word, or to replicate a painting stroke by stroke exceeded the cost of paraphrasing it in your own style. So most works were altered, and often improved, by the borrower before they were passed on. Fairy tales evolved mythic depth as many different authors worked on them and as they migrated from spoken tales to other media (theater, music, painting). This system worked well for audiences and performers, but the only way for most creators to earn a living from their works was through the support of patrons.

That ancient economics of creation was overturned at the dawn of the industrial age by the technologies of mass production. Suddenly, the cost of duplication was lower than the cost of appropriation. With the advent of the printing press, it was now cheaper to print thousands of exact copies of a manuscript than to alter one by hand. Copy makers could profit more than creators. This imbalance led to the technology of copyright, which established a new order. Copyright bestowed upon the creator of a work a temporary monopoly — for 14 years, in the United States — over any copies of the work. The idea was to encourage authors and artists to create yet more works that could be cheaply copied and thus fill the culture with public works.

Not coincidentally, public libraries first began to flourish with the advent of cheap copies. Before the industrial age, libraries were primarily the property of the wealthy elite. With mass production, every small town could afford to put duplicates of the greatest works of humanity on wooden shelves in the village square. Mass access to public-library books inspired scholarship, reviewing and education, activities exempted in part from the monopoly of copyright in the United States because they moved creative works toward the public commons sooner, weaving them into the fabric of common culture while still remaining under the author's copyright. These are now known as "fair uses."

This wonderful balance was undone by good intentions. The first was a new copyright law passed by Congress in 1976. According to the new law, creators no longer had to register or renew copyright; the simple act of creating something bestowed it with instant and automatic rights. By default, each new work was born under private ownership rather than in the public commons. At first, this reversal seemed to serve the culture of creation well. All works that could be copied gained instant and deep ownership, and artists and authors were happy. But the 1976 law, and various revisions and extensions that followed it, made it extremely difficult to move a work into the public commons, where human creations naturally belong and were originally intended to reside. As more intellectual property became owned by corporations rather than by individuals, those corporations successfully lobbied Congress to keep extending the once-brief protection enabled by copyright in order to prevent works from returning to the public domain. With constant nudging, Congress moved the expiration date from 14 years to 28 to 42 and then to 56.

While corporations and legislators were moving the goal posts back, technology was accelerating forward. In Internet time, even 14 years is a long time for a monopoly; a monopoly that lasts a human lifetime is essentially an eternity. So when Congress voted in 1998 to extend copyright an additional 70 years beyond the life span of a creator — to a point where it could not possibly serve its original purpose as an incentive to keep that creator working — it was obvious to all that copyright now existed primarily to protect a threatened business model. And because Congress at the same time tacked a 20-year extension onto all existing copyrights, nothing — no published creative works of any type — will fall out of protection and return to the public domain until 2019. Almost everything created today will not return to the commons until the next century. Thus the stream of shared material that anyone can improve (think "A Thousand and One Nights" or "Amazing Grace" or "Beauty and the Beast") will largely dry up.

In the world of books, the indefinite extension of copyright has had a perverse effect. It has created a vast collection of works that have been abandoned by publishers, a continent of books left permanently in the dark. In most cases, the original publisher simply doesn't find it profitable to keep these books in print. In other cases, the publishing company doesn't know whether it even owns the work, since author contracts in the past were not as explicit as they are now. The size of this abandoned library is shocking: about 75 percent of all books in the world's libraries are orphaned. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain. A luckier 10 percent are still in print. The rest, the bulk of our universal library, is dark.

5. The Moral Imperative to Scan

The 15 percent of the world's 32 million cataloged books that are in the public domain are freely available for anyone to borrow, imitate, publish or copy wholesale. Almost the entire current scanning effort by American libraries is aimed at this 15 percent. The Million Book Project mines this small sliver of the pie, as does Google. Because they are in the commons, no law hinders this 15 percent from being scanned and added to the universal library.

The approximately 10 percent of all books actively in print will also be scanned before long. Amazon carries at least four million books, which includes multiple editions of the same title. Amazon is slowly scanning all of them. Recently, several big American publishers have declared themselves eager to move their entire backlist of books into the digital sphere. Many of them are working with Google in a partnership program in which Google scans their books, offers sample pages (controlled by the publisher) to readers and points readers to where they can buy the actual book. No one doubts electronic books will make money eventually. Simple commercial incentives guarantee that all in-print and backlisted books will before long be scanned into the great library. That's not the problem.

The major problem for large publishers is that they are not certain what they actually own. If you would like to amuse yourself, pick an out-of-print book from the library and try to determine who owns its copyright. It's not easy. There is no list of copyrighted works. The Library of Congress does not have a catalog. The publishers don't have an exhaustive list, not even of their own imprints (though they say they are working on it). The older, the more obscure the work, the less likely a publisher will be able to tell you (that is, if the publisher still exists) whether the copyright has reverted to the author, whether the author is alive or dead, whether the copyright has been sold to another company, whether the publisher still owns the copyright or whether it plans to resurrect or scan it. Plan on having a lot of spare time and patience if you inquire. I recently spent two years trying to track down the copyright to a book that led me to Random House. Does the company own it? Can I reproduce it? Three years later, the company is still working on its answer. The prospect of tracking down the copyright — with any certainty — of the roughly 25 million orphaned books is simply ludicrous.

Which leaves 75 percent of the known texts of humans in the dark. The legal limbo surrounding their status as copies prevents them from being digitized. No one argues that these are all masterpieces, but there is history and context enough in their pages to not let them disappear. And if they are not scanned, they in effect will disappear. But with copyright hyperextended beyond reason (the Supreme Court in 2003 declared the law dumb but not unconstitutional), none of this dark library will return to the public domain (and be cleared for scanning) until at least 2019. With no commercial incentive to entice uncertain publishers to pay for scanning these orphan works, they will vanish from view. According to Peter Brantley, director of technology for the California Digital Library, "We have a moral imperative to reach out to our library shelves, grab the material that is orphaned and set it on top of scanners."

No one was able to unravel the Gordian knot of copydom until 2004, when Google came up with a clever solution. In addition to scanning the 15 percent out-of-copyright public-domain books with their library partners and the 10 percent in-print books with their publishing partners, Google executives declared that they would also scan the 75 percent out-of-print books that no one else would touch. They would scan the entire book, without resolving its legal status, which would allow the full text to be indexed on Google's internal computers and searched by anyone. But the company would show to readers only a few selected sentence-long snippets from the book at a time. Google's lawyers argued that the snippets the company was proposing were something like a quote or an excerpt in a review and thus should qualify as a "fair use."

Google's plan was to scan the full text of every book in five major libraries: the more than 10 million titles held by Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library. Every book would be indexed, but each would show up in search results in different ways. For out-of-copyright books, Google would show the whole book, page by page. For the in-print books, Google would work with publishers and let them decide what parts of their books would be shown and under what conditions. For the dark orphans, Google would show only limited snippets. And any copyright holder (author or corporation) who could establish ownership of a supposed orphan could ask Google to remove the snippets for any reason.

At first glance, it seemed genius. By scanning all books (something only Google had the cash to do), the company would advance its mission to organize all knowledge. It would let books be searchable, and it could potentially sell ads on those searches, although it does not do that currently. In the same stroke, Google would rescue the lost and forgotten 75 percent of the library. For many authors, this all-out campaign was a salvation. Google became a discovery tool, if not a marketing program. While a few best-selling authors fear piracy, every author fears obscurity. Enabling their works to be found in the same universal search box as everything else in the world was good news for authors and good news for an industry that needed some. For authors with books in the publisher program and for authors of books abandoned by a publisher, Google unleashed a chance that more people would at least read, and perhaps buy, the creation they had sweated for years to complete.

6. The Case Against Google

Some authors and many publishers found more evil than genius in Google's plan. Two points outraged them: the virtual copy of the book that sat on Google's indexing server and Google's assumption that it could scan first and ask questions later. On both counts the authors and publishers accused Google of blatant copyright infringement. When negotiations failed last fall, the Authors Guild and five big publishing companies sued Google. Their argument was simple: Why shouldn't Google share its ad revenue (if any) with the copyright owners? And why shouldn't Google have to ask permission from the legal copyright holder before scanning the work in any case? (I have divided loyalties in the case. The current publisher of my books is suing Google to protect my earnings as an author. At the same time, I earn income from Google Adsense ads placed on my blog.)

One mark of the complexity of this issue is that the publishers suing were, and still are, committed partners in the Google Book Search Partner Program. They still want Google to index and search their in-print books, even when they are scanning the books themselves, because, they say, search is a discovery tool for readers. The ability to search the scans of all books is good for profits.

The argument about sharing revenue is not about the three or four million books that publishers care about and keep in print, because Google is sharing revenues for those books with publishers. (Google says publishers receive the "majority share" of the income from the small ads placed on partner-program pages.) The argument is about the 75 percent of books that have been abandoned by publishers as uneconomical. One curious fact, of course, is that publishers only care about these orphans now because Google has shifted the economic equation; because of Book Search, these dark books may now have some sparks in them, and the publishers don't want this potential revenue stream to slip away from them. They are now busy digging deep into their records to see what part of the darkness they can declare as their own.

The second complaint against Google is more complex. Google argues that it is nearly impossible to track down copyright holders of orphan works, and so, it says, it must scan those books first and only afterward honor any legitimate requests to remove the scan. In this way, Google follows the protocol of the Internet. Google scans all Web pages; if it's on the Web, it's scanned. Web pages, by default, are born copyrighted. Google, therefore, regularly copies billions of copyrighted pages into its index for the public to search. But if you don't want Google to search your Web site, you can stick some code on your home page with a no-searching sign, and Google and every other search engine will stay out. A Web master thus can opt out of search. (Few do.) Google applies the same principle of opting-out to Book Search. It is up to you as an author to notify Google if you don't want the company to scan or search your copyrighted material. This might be a reasonable approach for Google to demand from an author or publisher if Google were the only search company around. But search technology is becoming a commodity, and if it turns out there is any money in it, it is not impossible to imagine a hundred mavericks scanning out-of-print books. Should you as a creator be obliged to find and notify each and every geek who scanned your work, if for some reason you did not want it indexed? What if you miss one?

There is a technical solution to this problem: for the search companies to compile and maintain a common list of no-scan copyright holders. A publisher or author who doesn't want a work scanned notifies the keepers of the common list once, and anyone conducting scanning would have to remove material that was listed. Since Google, like all the other big search companies — Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo — is foremost a technical-solution company, it favors this approach. But the battle never got that far.

7. When Business Models Collide

In thinking about the arguments around search, I realized that there are many ways to conceive of this conflict. At first, I thought that this was a misunderstanding between people of the book, who favor solutions by laws, and people of the screen, who favor technology as a solution to all problems. Last November, the New York Public Library (one of the "Google Five") sponsored a debate between representatives of authors and publishers and supporters of Google. I was tickled to see that up on the stage, the defenders of the book were from the East Coast and the defenders of the screen were from the West Coast. But while it's true that there's a strand of cultural conflict here, I eventually settled on a different framework, one that I found more useful. This is a clash of business models.

Authors and publishers (including publishers of music and film) have relied for years on cheap mass-produced copies protected from counterfeits and pirates by a strong law based on the dominance of copies and on a public educated to respect the sanctity of a copy. This model has, in the last century or so, produced the greatest flowering of human achievement the world has ever seen, a magnificent golden age of creative works. Protected physical copies have enabled millions of people to earn a living directly from the sale of their art to the audience, without the weird dynamics of patronage. Not only did authors and artists benefit from this model, but the audience did, too. For the first time, billions of ordinary people were able to come in regular contact with a great work. In Mozart's day, few people ever heard one of his symphonies more than once. With the advent of cheap audio recordings, a barber in Java could listen to them all day long.

But a new regime of digital technology has now disrupted all business models based on mass-produced copies, including individual livelihoods of artists. The contours of the electronic economy are still emerging, but while they do, the wealth derived from the old business model is being spent to try to protect that old model, through legislation and enforcement. Laws based on the mass-produced copy artifact are being taken to the extreme, while desperate measures to outlaw new technologies in the marketplace "for our protection" are introduced in misguided righteousness. (This is to be expected. The fact is, entire industries and the fortunes of those working in them are threatened with demise. Newspapers and magazines, Hollywood, record labels, broadcasters and many hard-working and wonderful creative people in those fields have to change the model of how they earn money. Not all will make it.)

Kevin Kelly is the "senior maverick" at Wired magazine and author of "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World" and other books. He last wrote for the magazine about digital music.

Correction: May 14, 2006

An article on Page 42 of The Times Magazine today about the future of book publishing misstates the number and type of libraries in China from which a Chinese company, Superstar, has made digital copies of books. It is 200 libraries of all kinds, not 900 university libraries.
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