A tragedy

This is one of those things that hit you - or at least me - in a way that's difficult to explain. I have no reason to think I would ever be at this place nor that I would have had cause to make use of what it had - but the sense of loss is palpable.

Weimar, Germany (AP, September 4) - A fire that tore through one of Germany's most precious historical libraries destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of irreplaceable books, although a human chain spirited to safety about 6,000 works, including a 1543 Martin Luther Bible, officials said Friday.

About 25,000 books were destroyed and an additional 40,000 damaged by water and smoke from the fire Thursday night in Weimar's Duchess Anna Amalia Library, housed in a 16th-century Rococo palace, said Ulrike Bestgen, an expert with the Weimar Classics Foundation.

In a bit of good news,

Bestgen said it should be possible to restore water-damaged volumes.

Still, the loss of thousands of irreplaceable books is such a tragedy. I use computers, I work with them, I do research on them, I actually prefer writing on them to longhand, which I find clumsy. (Maybe if I had better handwriting I'd feel different, but I don't so I don't.) I even read the news on them.

But there is still something about a book, about holding it in your hands, about being able to carry it from place to place, about the reality of the storehouse of human knowledge and experience that books represent, about the fact that the printing press has been held to be the most significant technological advance of the millennium - there is just something that makes the permanent loss of a book a sad occasion.