During 2010, 7,339 new Israeli titles were registered by the Legal Deposit Department of the National Library: 6,285 books, 725 new periodicals, and 329 non-print titles, such as CDs and cassettes. In addition, some 16,500 issues of current periodicals and newspapers were received in the National Library of Israel. Although not covered by Legal Deposit, the Library also received 1,380 masters’ theses and 1,038 doctoral theses. The Library’s catalogue is the most comprehensive in Israel, and includes the vast majority of the titles published in Israel.

See here for more statistics.

What makes a Jewish book?

Who are the People of the Book?

How have Jewish books changed with changes in technology?

The “history of the book” is a lively field of historical scholarship that looks at authorship, publication, and dissemination of texts of all kinds as windows onto culture and society in different periods and places. Book history also plumbs the relationships between writers, scribes, printers, and readers.

Join us as an international group of scholars examine the contours of Jewish identity through the captivating study of texts in Hebrew and other Jewish languages, and of the Jews and non-Jews who produced and consumed them.

Participating scholars:

Adam Shear | University of Pittsburgh
Katrin Kogman-Appel | Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton
Menahem Schmelzer | Jewish Theological Seminary
Gennady Estraikh | New York University
Marjorie Lehman | Jewish Theological Seminary
David Stern | University of Pennsylvania
Elisheva Carlebach | Columbia University
Jeremy Stolow | Concordia University
Jonathan Karp | American Jewish Historical Society
Jeffrey Shandler | Rutgers University
Alana Newhouse | Tablet Magazine
Eliyahu Stern | Yale University

For more information and full program please visit www.programs.cjh.org.

This program is made possible by the generous support of Amy P. Goldman and the Lillian Goldman Charitable Trust.

Admission: $20 general, $15 CJH, partner and Association for Jewish Studies members, $8 students and seniors

Click here to buy tickets to this event.

1. A nice article about the plans for the National Library of Israel. Also see this article from the Jpost.
2. An article by Dr. Harel Gordon on Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. Dr. Gordon wrote his dissertation on Rav Moshe’s halakhic methodology.

Bookshelf Porn presents pictures of rooms that are filled with bookshelves. What a website. (hat tip)

For anyone who is looking to add a book to their bookshelf, The Book on the Bookshelf is recommended.

From Gary Becker.

The decline of bookstores, theatres, laundries, and other retail industries with physical facilities illustrates a trend that runs counter to older ideas about the effects of economic development. The process of development has been presumed to cause a substitution of market activities for home production. For example, households in poor rural societies have not only grown their own food, but also made much of their clothing, washed their clothes, baked their bread, and cooked from scratch their other food. As countries underwent economic growth, many of these productive activities left the home and migrated to the marketplace. Factory-made clothing was substituted for clothing made at home, and bakeries and laundries developed to make bread and sweets, and to wash, clean, and dry clothes.

Further technological developments,however, such as small motors used in home washing and drying machines, and small machines that cooked bread easily at home, shifted many activities back into the home, and thereby saved on time and energy spent in the shopping process. The online digital revolution is a further major step in this trend of returning activities to the home. Time and effort are saved, for example, when instead of going to movie theatres, consumers both order and download films online to be viewed at “home”, either on television sets, or increasingly on computers.

From this perspective, what is happening to bookstores is not unusual. “Books” are still read at “home”, but increasingly they are also purchased at home, and not only in hard copy form. Digital books are a true revolution, but their effects on bookstores are only a small part of a broader technological development that has brought important activities into the home.

From Richard Posner, who has written lots of books.

The substitution of online for bookstore distribution of books will provide a substantial social saving and, as I said, increase the demand for books by reducing their retail price. As for the effect on publishers and authors of books, there is concern that it will be adverse, but that seems unlikely. A seller tries to minimize his cost of distribution, just as he tries to minimize his other costs; the publisher is the ultimate seller, and the bookstore part of the chain of distribution. But there is an important, and potentially relevant, exception, and that is where a distributor provides point-of-sale services that increase the demand for the product. This is the rationale for resale price maintenance: manufacturers of some goods place a floor under the retail price of the goods, thus deliberately increasing the retailers’ margin, but hoping by doing so to induce them to engage in nonprice competition that will increase the demand for the goods. Bookstore staffs, by decisions they make concerning choice and display of books to carry, and by making purchasing suggestions to customers, can, in principle, increase the demand for books. But these services cannot guarantee the survival of many bookstores, because unless the services are valued by a greater margin than seems realistic to expect, there will be too few customers to defray the bookstore’s fixed costs at acceptable prices.

The question then becomes whether the loss of point-of-sale services that bookstores provide will hurt publishers (and therefore authors, whose prosperity is linked to that of publishers) more than it will help them by reducing their distribution costs. That too is doubtful. As technology continues its forward march, online booksellers will find it increasingly feasible to duplicate and indeed improve on the point-of-sale services that bookstores offer. Bookstores will decline, and perhaps vanish when the current older generation, consisting of people habituated to printed books (as to printed newspapers), dies off. Yet this may well represent genuine economic progress, just as department stores and supermarkets represent progress though they cause the demise of countless small retailers.

The exhibition was the closest one could ever come to seeing the entire Jewish people in its generations gathered in a single enclosed space. There is a famous rabbinic legend to the effect that when Moses received the Torah at Mount Sinai, not just the Israelites who had left Egypt in the Exodus but the soul of every Jew past and present stood at the foot of the mountain. Looking at Valmadonna at Sotheby’s was like standing at Sinai.

Stern wants to know what is going to happen to the library now.

As of this writing, it is not known who bought Valmadonna. The fear is that the library was acquired either by dealers who will split it up and sell it piecemeal, or by a well-intentioned collector who may not have the resources or the knowledge to exploit its riches as a cultural treasure.

He concludes and writes,

But a great collector knows that he or she is only the guardian of a collection, that it truly belongs to the world. Valmadonna is this, and more. It is a genuine treasure of Jewish culture, indeed of world culture. It is only to be hoped that whoever acquired the library from Sotheby’s will appreciate this — and treat it accordingly.

I wonder how the following comments of his relate to Hebrew printing.

Q: What did you find most interesting of the trends that you uncovered in your study of the early book industry?

A: Two things. The first is the extent to which the new book market was underpinned by books that hadn’t played any role in the conventional narrative of what’s called the “print revolution.” The earliest commentators welcomed print, celebrating it as an essential part of the civilizing process on the way to modernity.

But inevitably this view concentrates on the most eye-catching of the newly-printed books: the great Bibles of Gutenberg and Plantin, Copernicus and scientific books, atlases, maps. The fact is that these big books almost always lost money. The engine room of the new industry turned out to be small books and pamphlets, at most two days’ work in the print shop, which could turn a quick profit. I think our project is the first thing that has really spelled this out in quantitative terms.

The second thing is our discovery of what you might call a two-speed Europe. The conventional geography of print always emphasizes how quickly it spread throughout Europe. Within 50 years of print’s invention, over 200 places had a printing press. But most of those early presses only survived a few years—they quickly went out of business and print contracted. What we discovered is around 85 percent of print output was produced close to the geographical center of European trade—in France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. This was the heart of production. Outside this central zone, Spain, England, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe had essentially dependent markets.