Book Reviews Featuring a Special Essay by Russell W. Belk

My title steals from Walter Benjamin twice. The main title is taken from his “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting” (1968b). In that somewhat obscure paper, Benjamin wistfully conveys some of the rich memories conjured up by the books in his library. Each volume evokes a detailed recollection of how it was ardently stalked, carefully acquired, and lovingly placed on his shelves, even though Benjamin, like most book collectors, never sullied his treasures by reading them. Likewise, he did not play with the toys he collected. Strange as this may seem, it is characteristic, if not definitive, that objects in a collection are taken out of their ordinary uses and given special revered status as part of a sacred set (Belk 1995). This part of the title is meant to announce that in this essay, I intend to say something about books, collecting, and the mnemonic power of objects. My subtitle is a transmogrification of another Benjamin (1968a) paper title, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In this more famous paper, Benjamin worries about the loss of mystical “aura” when visual artistic images are no longer produced as totally unique handwrought works of art but are instead duplicated in mass quantities through photography, film, and printing (this was before television, e-mail, faxes, videocassette recorders, digital versatile disks [DVDs], compact disks [CDs], and the Internet and before Andy Warhol began mass producing pop art in a loft he called The Factory). My transliteration of this title is meant to suggest that marketing professors might be thought of as works of art but that their value may be subject to rapid decline in an age in which access to scholarship is democratized through new electronic media. But this is only one of the senses in which my subtitle is intended. I also explore the more positive opportunities that the emerging electronic age provides for professionals who study and teach about marketing and consumption. Among other things, these changes mean that professors may not all die of white lung disease from scratching calcium carbonate on blackboards. There are some additional benefits of new technologies as well. To preface these inquiries and provide a thin thread that bastes them together, I include a short narrative about my own encounters with books and alternative electronic media. Lest I be thought to be presumptuously comparing myself to Walter Benjamin, I hasten to emphasize that the only partial similarities are some shared German Jewish heritage (though I lack a Jewish upbringing) and an abiding interest in consumption phenomena and art. Furthermore, whereas Benjamin’s material trajectory from his family of birth was decidedly downward from affluence, mine has been modestly upward, thanks to being the first college graduate in my family. Whereas Benjamin was born before the dawn of the twentieth century and felt the turmoil of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, I was born just after World War II and felt the rush of consumer culture’s rise to power in the United States. Whereas Benjamin regarded it as a virtue never to use the first person singular in his writings (even his “autobiographical” writings), I do not, as is already evident. And, most significantly, whereas Benjamin has been described as the last of the great intellectuals, I would hardly describe myself as such, even in my fondest imagination.