Most of all, I enjoy hunting for treasure within the pages of old books. Marginal notes are a great find: answers written in pencil, erased, rewritten in the 1942 Wartime Refresher in Fundamental Mathematics, thick until the answer page for the Sixth Day, then silent; someone struggled mightily, and stopped abruptly, and I’ll never know why. Inscriptions are fascinating, too. My favorite inscription is in a Washington Irving Sketch Book, “From Miss Ida Pyrah to Henrietta Tietjens, June 30, 1903, My Seventh Year teacher”. Both women are long gone by now, more than a century later, but I still treasure the little book, its cover embossed with silver leaves and blue flowers, that was a special gift between them.

All these unique characteristics of old books are, of course, lost when a book takes electronic form. So are sensations relating to the physical dimensions of a book: Is it a coffee table book, too tall for a bookshelf? Is it a slim paperback, easily carried in a purse or a pocket? A great deal of information about the physical nature of a book, as well as about the characteristics of its readers, is unavailable when the book is read on a computer screen rather than on paper. It may be, though, that other things are gained.

One wonderful old book to which I often refer is A Modern Herbal by Mrs. M. Grieve F.R.H.S, first published in 1931. Subtitled “The Medicinal, Culinary, Cosmetic and Economic Properties, Cultivation and Folklore of Herbs, Grasses, Fungi, Shrubs and Trees with All Their Modern Scientific Uses”, the book was reprinted in 1994; that’s the version I have, the version that until recently has been my first stop when investigating traditional and possible uses of plant material. I still keep the 912-page (almost too much for me to lift with one hand) A Modern Herbal near my desk, and I do enjoy browsing it at odd moments, but most often now I use another version when seeking a quick orientation to a new plant: the online version available at Botanical.com.

This HTML version of the book is, as HTML versions are, more readily searched than the printed version, and it can be searched in ways never anticipated when the printed index was prepared. For example, after noticing that the entry for “Strawberry” included a recipe for turkey roasted in strawberry leaves (“Cover him with a silver dish cover.”), I searched the entire online text for “turkey” and found 42 entries, identifying plants that are native to Turkey, plants widely consumed in Turkey, plants for which “turkey” is part of the name (turkey oak, turkey gum, turkey hen flower, turkey rhubarb, turkey corn, and many more), plants which produce a dye known as “Turkey red” or are used to tan “Turkey leather”, and plants which Mrs. Grieve suggests in recipes for cooking turkey (chestnut, summer savory, thyme, and the strawberry leaves that started my quest). The Service Index for the printed version provides no entry for “turkey” at all; the Index of Country Names lists only “Turkey pea”. Both useful and entertaining, the search tool for the book may be its best feature. In addition to a search tool, the online version has added a great many illustrations not included in my printed copy. The print version begins with a List of Plates; there are ninety-six of them, some containing one and some containing two black-and-white illustrations, placed near, but not necessarily adjacent to, the textual discussion of the illustrated plant. Reading the print version, when I wonder whether there might be an illustration I quickly flip a few pages in either direction of the textual entry for a plant, or I check the List of Plates; online, there either is or isn’t an illustration provided on the page for the plant, but there’s no purpose in searching for it.

Direct access to combined text and illustrations sounds like a benefit (many of the online illustrations, as on the “Arnica” page shown here, are in color and truly beautiful), but I’m not sure it is; I am sure that I’ve learned more by flipping through the pages of A Modern Herbal, meeting plants I’d never heard of or wondered about, than I have by reading the pages I knew enough to directly seek.

With that said, there’s no denying that the online pages are more visually exciting than the print pages; compare, for example, the print version of the "Arnica" entry (with entries for "Arenaria, Rubra", "Arrachs", "Areca Nut", "Archangel", and part of "Arbutus, Trailing" also visible) below and the online version of the page dedicated to Arnica, shown above.

The print version provides an illustration of Arnica but, with the Arnica article on page 55, and the illustration of Arnica and True Angostura, on Plate V, between pages 50 and 51, I have to turn back past the pages for "Arbutus (Strawberry Tree)", "Aroraba", "Aralias", and "Apricot", and the plate for "Stinking Arrach" and "Persian Asafedita", to get there; again, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

Paratextual apparatus (things like the Index and the List of Plates) is important and prominent in the book, but missing or hard to find on the website; I can imagine a hypertext version of the List of Plates, or perhaps some version of an online photo album, giving direct access to all the illustrations without the interference of with the textual descriptions of the plants, but I can’t find any such thing. Because I know the print version contains quite an interesting Introduction, I searched for it and found it; because the website is not structured to have the sense of front-to-back order that a book necessarily has, I would never have encountered the Introduction if I had not known to look for it. Missing the contextual information provided by the front matter of a book sounds trivial, but may actually be dangerous in cases such as this one, in which outdated knowledge is presented as “modern”; for the author and editor in 1931, it was as modern as could be. The designers of the website are to be commended for taking the very responsible step of ending every page with a bright red warning: Bear in mind "A Modern Herbal" was written with the conventional wisdom of the early 1900's. This should be taken into account as some of the information may now be considered inaccurate, or not in accordance with modern medicine. This is one way in which the website is clearly safer to use than the printed text: if I were to photocopy and distribute pages from the printed book, no such warning would be attached unless I bothered to add it manually, but the warning is included (unless I bother to remove it manually) every time a page is printed from the website.

The website provides another service not possible with the book, and I am again impressed with how subtly and unobtrusively it has been accomplished. At the bottom of some pages, there is an invitation to Purchase this Herb from Botanical.com; clicking the link offered there leads to an online shopping page for bulk herbs, and only then is it apparent that the website is part of someone’s moneymaking enterprise. It’s a very natural fit, with the text of A Modern Herbal providing immensely more creative and attractive advertising for the herbs than any copywriter could produce. It also provides a convenient next step for the reader, who perhaps really would like to obtain some of the plant material and try it after reading Mrs. Grieve’s detailed report.

I wish there were more careful editing of the text ("paralytie" and "tineture" on the website are "paralytic"and "tincture" in the book; perhaps an optical scanner had trouble distinguishing "c" and "e"), and I wish there were some information provided about the source or sources of the illustrations. Still, I find the website a very useful tool, especially since I often work away from my office and the book is just too heavy to carry around. I’m glad this website is available; I’m also very glad I have a printed copy of the book.