Bibliophile

In the past, when I looked at my books, especially the rare or unusual editions, I would think that one day they would be really be interesting and even more rare or unusual then they were. A few of them might even be worth some serious money, although I’d never sell them.

Now when I look at them I think that soon they’ll seem quaint and they’ll be looked upon like 8-track cassettes, reel-to-reel tape, movie film, snapshots, or piano rolls—primitive information delivery devices.

Except no one ever admired an 8-track or skein of movie film for itself, no one ever thought a reel-to-reel tape had any aesthetic appeal, while these books are beautiful in themselves, they could all say “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” and I’d still want them for their typography, binding, paper, even just for their heft.

So instead of a library perhaps books will end up in museums as objects of design like the radio, vacuum cleaner, or waffle iron I saw today at the Brooklyn Museum in their open storage where they show a selection of the stuff they’ve got squirreled away.

Or they’ll be admired the way the tools and personal objects of ancient civilizations are appreciated by us—that mallet or comb didn’t have to decorated, it would work as well plain. But that’s still not quite it because the typography of a book, while often beautiful, is designed foremost to convey the message, the stock is chosen to facilitate reading, the binding is designed to make the book easy to read so a book isn’t decorated so much as it is designed to be read and when you think of it, the Kindles and iPads which threaten to make books qua books obsolete are simply imitating how a book works: The books is broken up into pages, which you turn, the length of the line is about the same as it is on paper because the eye can only scan so many characters before it loses track and so on.  The book page is imitated because no one wants to do serious reading off a computer monitor or watch it scroll down a television screen—yet.

But I don’t really care about any of that—I have no intention to buy an iPad, though I’m glad I own Apple stock. When I look at my books I’m happy to have read them all and reread a lot of them (Nabokov said you can never read a book, only reread it) but I also know that books are more than words.