Edinburgh Review over Five Days

By Wren Long

ONE - They are stately black books. Gold embossing and marbled hard covers. If they ever had dust jackets, they were shed more than a century ago. The 1880's saw them manufactured with a little shield on the spine: Oberlin College Library it says. Books custom-made to live on a shelf in Ohio. Now that's how you know your school used to be a big deal.

I wonder about them. That small legion of volumes: The Edinburgh Review, so far from home. The entire history of the publication, more than one hundred years, perched neatly on cold steel shelves in a building that looks like a bomb shelter with a degree in philosophy. Do they ever come down? Are they ever leafed through? Who would even need to know the Scottish pop-cultural fads of 1856?

They certainly look well-read. Their spines are all manners of chipped, cracked, and peeling. Even the books that have been re-bound look weathered: the old leather pasted onto a fraying canvas hardcover. Then again, Volume 199 has no spine at all, just bare yellowed pages held together by brittle string. I worry that if I were to touch it, the book would simply fall apart in my hands. What use are books like this in the age of the internet? When one can't control + F their way directly to what they're looking for? Then again, what use are plastic boxes and smooth black-glass tablets to the archeologists who will come looking for records of our time?

They have sat there, stately and simple, as the world has lurched forward. Subscription services and free article limits monopolize information. A previously free archive containing hundreds of thousands of digitized newspapers was bought and placed behind the paywall of Ancestry.com. Any query for information becomes data in an ever-growing web of advertising algorithms. Still, they endure, unaware but waiting, ready with the ink that had been stamped on their pages. Existing simply because they have survived. They are irrevocable, untouchable, near unaccounted for. A one-time purchase now perpetually able to tell anyone who asks about the happenings of one city in Scotland.

Plainly put, they are simple, stately black books embossed with gold, doing exactly what they were made to do, long after anybody cared to remember them. How lovely.

TWO - A young man sheds his winter coat and scarf, settling in at the white plywood table. He stares out the window to see pillars of concrete and glass, standing resolutely on the other side of the bridge. The noise of downstairs chatter and the groan of the front door on its hinges are the only interruptions to an otherwise perfect silence.

He looks to his left and sees them: the volumes of the Edinburgh Review. He pauses, not believing the dates stamped in gold on their spines. No way they'd just leave a two hundred-year old book out like that. No way he was actually allowed to touch it. He steps towards them cautiously, noticing the crumbs of dried black leather which had accumulated on the lip of the bookshelf. It looks a bit like soil. When his finger hooks around the top of the cover, he half expects an alarm to go off, or for someone to yell “DON'T TOUCH THE ART.”

Nothing happens. The pages are stiff, only parting slightly. The man hesitates to force it further, to crack the brittle spine and risk ripping it clean in half. He glimpses the name of one chapter: On Colonial Independence. This, more than the brown, moth-eaten pages and the vanilla-ish smell, cemented just how old the thing was. The words had been typed in earnest, as an actual, factual debate. At the time the pages were bound together, Australia was still under British rule.

A sudden guilt descends upon the young man, as if he's just defiled the Mona Lisa. He moves to place it back on the shelf, but the book slips from his fingers, hitting the floor with a booming thud. With a wince, he picks it up to see a page creased in a lopsided accordion fold. He tried to smooth it with the back of his hand, but the creases remained. He looked around, for someone to tell, for someone to apologize to. There was nobody. These things happen, after all. It is just a book in a library.

The man puts it back on the shelf, holding it tightly this time. It settles back into its place, as if it had never been moved at all. He backs away slowly, and turns away once he is satisfied that nothing else is going to happen.

He rifles through his bag and retrieves his laptop. He punches “The Edinburgh Review 1825 archive” into Google. The only results are blurry scans of single pages, and archive sites demanding membership fees. He sighs. He shrugs, resigned to the fact that he would simply never know.

THREE - Nobody knows this, but they aren't real. They haven't been real for quite some time. Ask the librarian, or the computer, and it will tell you that no such books were ever in the possession of Oberlin's libraries. (Their four libraries. Four. They really really want you to know that.)

So if they aren't real. Why can you see them? It's a good question. There's a good answer to that question. Well, there is an answer, anyway. They're holograms. The goddamn books are goddamn holograms. The real books were all removed around the same time they added ethernet ports to the dorm rooms.

You're looking at me like I'm crazy. I get that. Yeah, no man I get it. If I were you and you were me, I'd think you were crazy too. All I'm asking is that you think about it; really, consider it for a bit. Have you ever– and I mean ever– touched those books? Not the interesting looking ones, those are just the decoys. They gotta mix in some real ones so people don't get suspicious. I'm talking about those boring, one-color, generic-cover, bound periodicals. The AM Journal of Mathematics or The Edinburgh Review. Who the hell's ever gonna read that, sifting through hundreds of pages when they could just Google it and get the same thing. Nobody! They're holograms. They have to be.

So now you're asking yourself– and I know cause I can tell you're someone who thinks like me– why would they do this? Why would Oberlin College and Conservatory spend millions of dollars creating the world's first and only hyper realistic hologram projector? Is it aliens? A secret society? Money laundering? A secret society of aliens who took over a rural liberal arts college to act as a front for their money laundering?! Well, I'm here to tell you: yes. That's exactly what it is.

Wait wait wait wait! Don't walk away, I can prove it. I promise I can prove it. And I don't go around telling just anyone this, but I know you'll understand if you just hear me out. I can tell by the way you stand; the way you carry yourself. Ok, ready? cause I'm only gonna say this once.

There are four libraries in this town right? Cause that's what they always say. That's what they print on the tote bags. There's the Con, the art one, the science library, and Mudd. That's what they want you to think. But the truth has been staring you in the face since you first got here: The Oberlin Public Library!!! See? I told you didn't I? The pieces just all sort of click into place. I knew you'd understand.

FOUR - “You can read that?” | “Yeah all the way over there.” | “Really?” | “No way.” | “Prove it.” | “It says the Edinburgh Review.” | “Wait, that's not fair, Wren could've memorized that. He's writing about them for one of his classes.” | “Yeah but they didn't know that.” | “What about the ones next to them?” | “The Economist?” | “Is that what it says?” | “No way you can see that.” | “What are you writing about Wren?” | “It's this thing where we have to write about the same spot over five days, based on this book we read about cows. Something to do with blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction.” | “I can't imagine anything about the books changing that much day-to-day.”

“Ok wait, idea, pick a year.” | “1876” | “Dude these things are so dusty.”

FIVE – They look how they did a week ago; a year ago. Grayer, maybe, and dustier, but still a legion of handsome black books on a shelf in a library in Ohio. Time passes around them and they just sort of age. Despite nobody stopping to look; stopping to read, the entropy of it all still chips away at them. Leather dries and cracks. Pages yellow, then brown.

The facts they convey, however, are still unchanged. Even as the world looks backward; even as it re-evaluates the ink on the pages is oblivious to everything, and will insist that the British Empire is still rolling on its merry way.

What sort of fate is that to a book? Getting older and more out-of-date. Existing as a ruler-line, marking out the years and how many have passed since anyone had an honest, genuine need for them. Not as a novelty, but as a purveyor of information. How long has it been? Fifty years? One hundred?

Had they been bought by somebody else, I wonder what would have happened to them. Would they be stuffed under the wobbly corner of the sofa? Or maybe they would be filled with wax paper and flower petals, preserving memories for years to come.

One will have its pages torn out as it is flipped through again and again. One will wrinkle as a sleepless night sees coffee spilled all over the workdesk. Some will survive long enough to be digitized, forgotten on an airplane, or marked up with fluorescent yellow highlighter.

They will see use, they will work as books work until they are met with a fitting end. Except for the ones who were sent to libraries, and left on shelves with their century-spanning family. They are kept to convey out-of-date information to a world zooming forward; to hold their places as novelties, old things, wonderful things.

Things that are preserved through some active effort, yes, but mostly through a silent agreement from all those who pass by, see antiquity out and the open, and decide to leave it alone. Decide not to touch it because it has survived this long, and it should keep on surviving.