Month: January 2011

BIBLIOPHILIA

I have just read a lovely article in The Montreal Review about a man and his books. I will include a few paragraphs here but it should really be read in its entirety.

They crowd the house, upstairs and down, boxed, stacked and shelved. They continue to arrive, by mail, in bags, cartons and under my arm. I share my home with a small family and a horde of books.

My books also veer to extremes in size and weight, and their dimensions usually reflect their content. Fact-stuffed books tend to be thick and stand formidably on the shelf, like the dark-brown phalanx of the Encyclopedia Britannica in the den. Volumes of verse, such as Housman's or Rilke's, tend to be slender and refined, their spines embellished with artful design and typography, exhaling esprit de finesse. The few textbooks I still own are rugged and heavy. My metaphysical volumes, oddly, are either fat or skinny and rarely middle-sized. Some books are made for a pocket, others take up your entire lap. Their provenance is often obvious. The German books have a damn-the-cost quality, the few from India are loosely-bound and have lumpy paper, and the British ones bear elegant typefaces and gold-lettered spines. The American tend to extremes of handsomeness or homeliness.

I admit: concern with the exterior of books seems misplaced. Lord Chesterfield sniffed in one of his letters that ‘men of sense' give due attention to the inside of books and have due contempt for their outsides. By this standard, I lack sense. To my eye, a well-made book has something to say before you even open it. It announces itself and dispels the disjunction between medium and content. What I read becomes tinged by how I read it. Other means of delivering words to readers dispense with any feint of elegance. A drug-store paperback or a digital reader provides the same content as a cloth-bound version with impatient efficiency. Fine and good; but we are sensate souls. Though economy and speed have its place, so does the spendthrift delight in a well-made book that has somehow found its way into your hands.


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