I just finished
reading The Book: An Homage, by
Burkhard Spimnen. It’s a wonderful
tribute to bibliophiles and all things books.
In a series of essays he covers lots of fertile ground that appeals to
book-lovers, including topics such as the gifted book, the damaged book, the
old book, the dictionary, bookmobiles, the burned book and the stolen book.
Living in the culture
of the book, most of us would readily admit that books are our companions and
advisors. We couldn’t live without
books, feeling abandoned and lost. With books being so important to us, how could we ever settle on digital readers to placate our purist ways? We need to see, touch, smell, and experience
books.
As he waxes on about
the new book, the annotated book, the cheap book, the discovered book, and the
autographed book, he also tackles some other topics with touching words that
reflect his heartfelt passion for the printed word.
He talks about how
books can be collected and stockpiled, how they become a status symbol, and
how they can serve as art or decoration. But he also spoke of the value books
provide to us in their packaged contents, how a bond with one’s books runs
deep. Just to hear him discuss the
beauty and appeal of books and how they provide to us something special in their packaged contents, how you feel a bond
with one’s books runs deep. This book makes you want to romance a
bookstore, a library, and an antiquarian shop.
Below are select
excerpts from The Book:
New Books
Thus a new book is
also a promise. It gives to its owner
the sense that he’s been granted a privilege.
No matter how ancient the text, or how many times it has been reprinted,
a new book presents itself in a state of virginity. If anything, it makes us feel that the whole
previous history of its reading has been annulled, that we can begin again from
scratch. As if even today we could open
a copy of Shakespeare, Goethe, Zola, Joyce, etc., and return to the moment just
after the author has laid down the quill or stepped away from the typewriter.
The Old Book
Plenty of people
prefer old books to new as a matter of principle. Maybe because their age better conveys the
value of the text; maybe because they favor the rare above the commonplace,
above the welter of consumer goods. Or
because they like to surround themselves with objects that seem to preserve a
secret. Such people ensure that our
society reserves a sanctuary for old books.
The Right Book
The physicality of
books leads to problems of transportation and furnishing that one is hard-put
to solve. Beyond that, the book as a
physical object stands as a symbol for the somber fact that we can read only a
circumscribed number of books. Our
lives, like our bookshelves, have a limited capacity.
In other words: there’s a certain correspondence between the
amount of reading we can perform in a lifetime and the book-capacity of our
living spaces. Apparently about as many
texts enter our heads as books can fit into the average apartment, provided one
makes space in said apartment for a library.
Every new book we acquire takes up in our reading lives roughly the same
amount of space as it does on our bookshelves.
Which is why one
should always take care to select the right
book.
The Wrong Book
Often enough, the
wrong book simply can’t help it. Perhaps
it was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or we followed a bad recommendation, or didn’t
understand the recommendation correctly, or wrote it down incorrectly. In any case:
the wrong book is an irritation, one that you’d gladly get rid of. Yet as a physical object, it asserts its
presence; it isn’t so simple to remove this mistake from your world.
And even if it turns
out to have been a genuine wrong book, then at least you’ve read a book you
might have otherwise overlooked. And
this experience might possibly be more rewarding than having read the umpteenth
book that suits your taste.
The Signed Book
Sure, a signed book
is, to begin with, an acknowledged collector’s item; one can buy it from
antique dealers along with similar things like postage-stamps, lithographic
postcards of cities, or little elephants and lions made of silver. As the fame of the signed book, and people
can speculate on this possibility with great success. If you can get it signed by the author after
a reading, you’ve acquired it for no more than the retail price, and with a
pleasant memory to boot.
The Printed Word
Up until the advent
of printed books some five hundred years ago, books were written by hand. Every one of them was an original; unique and
recognizable. Since Gutenberg, however,
books have been widely distributed years ago, books were written by hand. Every one of them was an original; unique and
recognizable. Since Gutenberg, however,
books have been widely distributed in vast, identical editions. Perhaps one could say that there persists a
sharp longing for that lost unity of text and handwriting. Is that possible? After all, the first printed letters imitated
the handwriting of medieval scribes in order to improve the new medium’s
acceptance among readers. And maybe,
five hundred years later, we still haven’t quite gotten over the fact that,
through the printing and mass replication of books, the text has been distanced
from its author and, thereby, shed its aura of individuality. The manuscripts of important texts are housed
in archives and museums and exhibited like relics; literary scholars continually
pore over them in the hope of uncovering something about them lost in their
transition to print.
The Loaned Book
Many loaned books
spend weeks, months, even years, in the limbo of still-not. Still not read
but soon. Still not returned, damn it,
but not long now. I promise. In the worst cases, the loaned book becomes
completely unreadable for the borrower.
What’s more, he prefers to remove the thing from his sight, lest it
remind him of his predicament. Possibly
it will be packed in a moving box and leave the city, the country, the
continent; and finally, whether in the worst kind of bad circumstances, or out
of sheer forgetfulness, the borrower will wind up counting it among his own
possessions. Still later, the book will
have outlived both lender and borrower.
But only when it finds itself purchased again, most likely for a few
cents at a flea market, will its stain its stigma, be obliterated. Now, at last, it can be read again.
Until someone borrows
it.
The Stolen Book
Back at the beginning
of my college years, stealing books from the bookstore was considered a kind of
rite of passage for individuals of independent mind. In certain circles, texts were seen as public
property. The fact that they existed in
the actual, everyday world, for the most part, as commodities and private
possessions – that is, as books – was considered a strategy of domination on
the apart of the capitalist system, one that ought to be met whenever possible
by acts of insubordination, even vandalism.
Banned Books
Thus trials over
banning books are inevitably distressing.
They turn into an airing of dirty laundry, experts tweezing paragraphs
from texts, jurists agonizing over philosophical dilemmas. All the same, we have to live with such
trials – we should even be grateful for them.
Because in them arise concrete examples of what will increasingly
determine the everyday life and future of our democracies: the conflict, never
wholly resolved, between the necessities of security and the privilege of
freedom.
The Dictionary
Dictionaries are, in
any case, books that aim to fix the world and hold it fast. Inasmuch as they clamp it between boards,
they underscore the finitude of their subject.
Dictionaries are an object of comfort, even when their volumes fill
whole walls of shelves and you know you’ll never be able to read them all. For dictionaries seem to say: “Don’t worry.
The world may be complex, but it’s never the less containable. It may be huge, but look: it fits in a single
room.”
The Antiquarian
One type of shopper,
however, is found only at the antiquarian shop:
the manic treasure-hunter. He
carries around with him a long hit-list of fantasy finds, and wanders the world
of paper in his quest to make them real.
The notion that on these very shelves some long-sought book is waiting
for him (and for him alone) intoxicates and electrifies him.
The Bookstore
Bookstores may
resemble libraries, but they’re nothing of the kind. They’re more like way-stations, short-term
harbors for books on the journeys to the reader or toward still other
shelves. Here, too, the books are
perfectly ordered – but with a kind of train station or airport order, which
above all else (or, rather, only) serves the goal of expediting transfer. In the bookstore, no book is allowed to grow
old; instead, everything drives on toward change. Depending on the season, holiday, media hype,
or bestseller-lists, the piles of books can be swapped with lightning speed,
shelves emptied and newly filled again.
Bookshelves
For that, the
simplest possible bookshelf is always the advisable lifesaver. It’s perhaps the only type of furnishing that
doesn’t fall prey to great aesthetic, ethical, or moral qualms, or questions. It radiates a peculiar kind of warmth,
perhaps even that of its owner, and exudes a sense of simultaneous privacy and
openness, of character and function, that constitutes every living human
being. What other pierce of furniture
can do all that? I can’t think of a
single one.
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Brian Feinblum’s insightful views, provocative
opinions, and interesting ideas expressed in this terrific blog are his alone
and not that of his employer or anyone else. You can – and should -- follow him
on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels
much more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by
BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2018. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in
Westchester. His writings are often featured in The Writer and
IBPA’s Independent. This was named one of the best book
marketing blogs by Book Baby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs and recognized by Feedspot in 2018 as one of the
top book marketing blogs. Also named by WinningWriters.com as a "best
resource.” He recently hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America
and participated in a PR panel at the Sarah Lawrence College Writers Institute
Conference.
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