The substance of things
posted 17 March 06 by J.S. Vodalarius
I like books. Not just the spirits of books, you know, the wonderful words inside them, but books as objects. The copy of Empire Star that I got through interlibrary loan was a beautiful book, skinny and solid and green. The copy I bought online, one of the original doubles with The Ballad of Beta-2, is not very beautiful, but it’s small and light and feels good to hold.
I love books. I love the way they look, I like to hold them, I like to run my fingers over the lettering on the covers, I like to smell them – although new books don’t smell terribly good. If I wasn’t worried about getting the pages wet I’d taste them. Once I finished one book and then picked the next book to read partially because it was about the same size and shape, though a bit heavier. When I go into old book stores one of the first things I do is revel in the smell.
Currently I’m reading the Nevèrÿon books, by Samuel R. Delany. The copies I’ve got out from the library are the beautiful new Wesleyan Press editions. Whenever I pick them up they feel right in my hands. They’re almost perfect. What’s inside them is fairly wonderful too, but mostly right now I’m thinking about the outsides, the substance of them.
I wonder if you could consider a book and the story inside it separate objects. I mean, I could certainly love a book for the way it smells but detest the words inside it, and I love plenty of stories even though I hate their books – for example, The Ruby Knight, by David Eddings. It’s a wonderful story, but the cover came right off the paperback, and now the pages are in two little bunches. They’re still glued together, like little books themselves, but it isn’t nice. It bothers me that it should have come apart in only few years when I have another paperback, from the Nineteen Thirties, that’s probably the most solid book I own.
Huh.
Books make me happy. I have a lot of them.
Another question: why is it that I never have enough bookshelves?