I recently read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Great literature it is not, but it’s a fun read. In it I encountered a theme for which I was entirely unprepared: information technology. Van Helsing’s band of vampire hunters made abundant and effective use of the most recent innovations in information capture and reproduction. Dr. Seward used a phonograph with wax cylinders to keep his diaries. These were transcribed using a typewriter by Mina Murray. Mina and her fiancé Jonathan Harker were adept at shorthand. As the characters begin to realize the nature of the threat that they are facing, it becomes apparent that they must share and collate the unique information that each of them possesses, a task that falls primarily to Mina (the only woman in the group, of course). She creates typewritten transcripts in triplicate of Harker’s journals (recounting his imprisonment at Castle Dracula), Dr. Seward’s phonographic accounts of his “zoophagous” patient Renfield, and Van Helsing’s observations on the sickness and death of Lucy Westenra, the Count’s first English victim. This pooling and organizing of information is crucial to their success in driving Dracula from England and ultimately destroying him.
I wonder if the creators of Buffy the Vampire Slayer were thinking of this when they made Buffy’s mentor, Giles, a high school librarian? I also remember that in the movie version of Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned, the vampire Lestat taunts Jesse (a paranormal investigator), calling her merely “a clever librarian.”
One final note on Dracula. It is the first book that I have ever read entirely online. In the past I have been a harsh critic of e-books, since I felt that no one would really want to read a whole book online. Reference works I would allow, but I could never see the point of an online novel, except for easy searchability. I am beginning to come around, though. The edition of Dracula that I read was from the University of Adelaide’s collection of e-books, which includes a wide selection of literary classics presented in a very readable format.