Bibliography of Unfinished Books: A Chance Encounter

Last month on a long flight, I had a conversation with my row mate, an architect from Tennessee. When he found out I was a librarian, he said "what do you think about eBooks?" "Oh...gosh..." was all I could say for a few minutes. I asked if he wanted the long answer or the short answer and was relieved when he said "maybe the short answer." Truthfully, I'm still working on my long answer but here is my short answer: "It depends."
My architect friend is not alone in wondering about eBooks: almost every day someone asks me something about eBooks. Are they the wave of the future? The end of the biblio world as we know it? The harbinger of democracy or an omen of doom? I don't think there is an answer to the eBook question, or, more accurately, the eBook questions. While unanswerable in many ways, I think questions about eBooks are important for all of us to consider in whichever ways are important to us. The major issues, it seems to me, are related to copyright, access, and preservation. Here is but one example of an issue many of us need to consider sooner rather than later.

Today, while waiting for someone near the "overflow" reference works, I saw a title that caught my eye and made me smile: Bibliography of Unfinished Books (1915). Feeling guilty about being the authoress of two unfinished books, I sighed and picked it up to see if, by chance, my name and unfinished titles were listed there. Thankfully they were not.
While advances in eBooks (particularly related to historic books) intrigue and engage me,something magical happened in the act picking up this book, flipping through its yellow pages and liberating the decades worth of dust trapped on its edges. Embossed with gold lettering and bound in once elegant blue cloth now faded with disuse, this book captured my imagination in ways I've yet to fully articulate. I was instantly captivated and have since spent part of the afternoon perusing it and discovering in its pages the seeds of my next research project. There will be more to come on this subject over the next weeks and months to be sure but I thought it would be useful to post this brief note about one version of this book and post a link to another version. In some ways, they are the same book, in others, they are very, very different. More on this later.