By Jason Wilson
For the rest of the week, I will be posting some ad copy I wrote back in the mid to late 90s after the J. Peterman episodes ran on Seinfeld. None of this ever made the light of day, but I hope it gives you some sense of how I feel about books generally and our products, which is to say passionately. In this copy, please note the use of the phrase “information superhighway.”
There are a few of us here (and apparently it is a small group) who are true bibliophiles. We love books. We love the feel of them, the weight of them in our hands, their shape, their smell. Yes, the smell. Whether it’s the queer musty smell of time-yellowed volumes or the ephemeral scent of wood pulp and ink pressed between the cover of a hot-off-the-presses case book. It doesn’t matter. Each sniff helps us recall some part of our lives with honest fondness and we’re reminded of all the books we’ve ever bought, read, and loved before we knew anything about anything.
We’re surrounded by books and use them daily. By now, it’s safe to say we’re accustomed to their smell. But the law book does so much more than conjure up memories. Hold it in your hand, and you’ll come to know its length, how long from beginning to end. Look at the table of contents and you’ll get an idea of its structure. Thumb through the chapters in turn and you’ll gain context for the information. Study the index and you’ll realize how much you can find on your own without having to think too much.
But many law books nowadays are not something lawyers touch. They are simply “data” from sources that we pull from somewhere on the information superhighway. These new books have no cover, no weight, no size, no smell. Their pages are simply a screen, a window to information. As you scroll through these books, there is no sense of progress. Are you close to the end? Is what you’re looking for buried within an endless supply of hyperlinks? Context is lost and your thought process, which was once linear, is now random. You have access to everything and anything all at once. And surprisingly, you’re comfortable here because you’ve accepted this new research paradigm.
For over a decade we’ve fought the shift because we eschew randomness; it’s too much of a luxury. We believe (in our bibliophilic-centric view point) that lawyers need books. Real ones. Books that through their weight and size and smell evoke images of hard-at-work authors and editors buried beneath stacks of reporters and papers discovering the law, writing about it for you. O’Connor’s is that product. The books are heavy (but not too much), they’re self-contained, they’re written clearly (so you’ll feel smart), and organized linearly, much like you would practice law. Oh, and the ink and paper we use makes them smell very sweet.
[Image (cc) by A Hermida]
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