Singularity & Co.

There's something about cracking open a

science-fiction book from the 1960s—feeling the coarse paper under your fingertips and inhaling that special, musty smell that only well-worn paperbacks exude.

Sci-fi books of decades past are more than literary excursions. They are connections with our forebears formed by experiencing their predictions, meeting their heroes, and plumbing their invented mythologies. But these reservoirs of cultural history are drying up. Books don't last forever, and when they die, the ideas inside them die as well.

Luckily, there are dedicated geeks out there who don't sit idly by and let these past visions of the future fade away. Last week I attended the opening of the bookstore Singularity & Co., the Brooklyn-based brick-and-mortar manifestation of a movement to save sci-fi books in peril. The group chooses out-of-print sci-fi books, tracks down copyright holders, and publishes the work online and on all the major digital-book platforms.

"We are definite believers in nondestructive scanning and in minimizing the impact of reading on old and dear books," says Ash Kalb, co-founder of Singularity & Co. "That's a big part of our mission—to save the words on the page, in addition to preserving the pages."

Still, for all of us with collections of dead-tree sci-fi on the shelves, there has to be a way to read them without hurting the bindings, losing pages, or destroying the fragile covers. "It's really hard to read an old book without having some impact on it," Kalb says, "but I'm personally of the belief that a book that's being preserved rather than read isn't really a book anymore. The tips we have may be fairly straightforward, but they make a big difference in the long run."

Opening night at Singularity & Co.

Here's the company's take on how to save an old sci-fi favorite:

1. Use a bookmark. We've all been guilty of dog-earing a beloved book as we carry it around from place to place. Using a bookmark is perhaps the simplest thing you can do to help preserve the condition of a vintage sci-fi paperback.

2. Tread lightly on the spine. To keep your pulp in the best condition possible, take it easy on the spine of the book as you read—open it slowly and not any wider then needed to read the words. Very careful readers can get through a whole volume without ever "breaking" a book's spine. Singularity's custom nondestructive book scanner is specifically designed so that a book need not be opened more than 45 to 60 degrees to be scanned. The easier you are on the spine, the longer the book will last.

3. Transport with care. Books get beat up in back pockets and backpacks.

4. Pay attention to where you store your books. Moisture and direct sunlight are bad. Cool, dark, dry places are good.

5. Suggest your own tips. The whole point of Singularity & Co. is to make sure people can read classic sci-fi books without worrying about finding or damaging a rare paper copy. "We're here to help," Kalb says.

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