Respects for Frederick G. Kilgour

Frederick G. Kilgour, author of The Evolution of the Book (Oxford University Press | 1998) passed away on Monday, July 31st at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. Kilgour was a distinguished scholar and library systems innovator. The Evolution of the Book tells a five-thousand-year story, a tale beginning with the invention of writing and concluding with the emerging electronic book. An excerpt from The Evolution of the Book is below.

“The present situation with respect to electronic books is analogous to that of most late-nineteenth-century automobiles, which for nearly a decade after Karl Benz’s successful 1885 motorized tricycle were “horseless carriages,” until the French firm of Panhard and Lavassor built a machine having a design that has lasted more than a century: an engine in front under a hood instead of over the rear axle, a slanted post with steering wheel in place of a vertical post with tiller, and floor pedals rather than hand levers. The electronic book of the latter 1990s might be described as still being in the “horseless-carriage” stage…

The unacceptability of the present electronic book is often expressed in what has come to be known as the “can’t curl up in bed with it” syndrome, closely followed by the “can’t read it at the beach” complaint. Both protests are valid, but it may be supposed that advances in technology and design will soon overcome these insufficiencies as they have overcome others in the history of the book. After all, second- and third-century codices, many a foot or more tall, hardly constituted bedfellows, any more than did the seventeen-inch-tall 42-line Gutenberg Bible, or the taller-than-a-foot folios that followed in 1457,1459,1460, and 1462.”