— Robin Sloan: Spending time with the material
A wild find at a comic book store yesterday: The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons, a doorstop volume, devoted mostly to complete reproductions of early versions of the game, from typewritten drafts to published booklets. This isn’t just a breezy review, but a presentation of real archival material. I pored over the book for hours, enjoying the edits in pencil, the 1970s paste-up design. I read out of order, flipped back and forth, skimmed and scanned, jotted notes on my phone.
It occurred to me, deep into a really wonderful experience, of reading and thinking and wondering and feeling, that if Wizards of the Coast had published exactly the same material online — and you can imagine this easily: you can imagine the website, as slick as one of the Google Arts & Culture sites, or the digital book from the Steve Jobs Archive — I would have clicked over; said, “wow, cool”; then moved on to the next thing.
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[W]e can see plainly the value of the book as information technology: a mechanism for accessing a bundle of material, for spending time with it, for investigating and considering it. Still unmatched!
There are books I like to own as a physical, printed copy. And there are books where I don’t bother, books that I prefer to read on my trusty eleven-year-old old Kindle.
Like Sloan’s copy of “The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons”, the books I buy in a shop are those that are highly visual, containing many photographs, maps, and graphics. The books you come back to, in an idle moment, to flip through its pages, go back and forth in a non-linear way. Whereas a novel? That I get digital. It’s likely I’ll only read it once and never touch it again.