More on the Content Tsunami: Digitized Versions of Public-Domain Books

Any work published before 1929 is in the public domain. That means the bulk of pre-twentieth century classics can be downloaded for free from Google Books. However, as historian and librarian Robert Darnton has warned repeatedly from the pages of the New York Review of Books, the Google book digitization project is very different from the process of making a modern scholarly edition of a classic. When you dive into the freebie editions in the public domain of Jane Austen and Tirso de Molina, you are pretty much at the mercy of the quality of the edition from centuries past, before the careful comparison of versions and variants gave birth to the contemporary discipline of textual criticism.

The Financial Translator’s Bookshelf: High Financier, by Niall Ferguson

High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg, by Niall Ferguson

Will “Fabulous Fab” read this and have a Damascene conversion? Fat chance

I feel an acute ambivalence toward Niall Ferguson’s work: if his name is on the byline of a column in the FT or the Wall Street Journal, I will gladly read it through as he brings the “longue durée” perspective of history to the minutiae of current economic events. However, when it comes to his scholarly work, I have to will myself to read through to the end. You sometimes feel as if you were listening to him distractedly hurrying through a graduate seminar as he daydreams about his next appointment with Henry Kissinger.
In this biography of the unofficial founder of the postwar City of London and the creator of the Eurobond market, Ferguson has a clearly didactic ambition: to remind “a new generation of bankers of Siegmund Warburg’s haute banque ideal — financial service based on the primacy of the client relationship rather than the speculative transaction.” This is a lofty, laudable, conscientious, and earnest (albeit slightly self-righteous) motivation. And he proceeds to do exactly that, thanks to unprecedented access to Warburg’s personal papers, in a methodical, conscientious, scrupulous and at times (cringingly) obsequious way (the caption to one picture reads: “Siegmund as a boy: already happiest with book in hand”). However, he discharges his duty in such a bloodless fashion that you sometimes wonder if he was even more tortured by ennui than his reader. Is there any possibility that, as Ferguson intends, a purveyor of synthetic squared CDOs will peruse all of its pages and feel a tinge of shame or that a “Fabulous Fab” will have a Damascene conversion while traipsing through this grey tome? Fat chance.