Book fetishes

May 13th, 2008

That’s right. I said ‘fetishes’ in a blog post. Tomorrow and each day henceforth will be spent rejecting spam comments.

There was a self-confessed book fetishist on radio 4 the other day bemoaning the fact that Picador have recently decided to ditch hard-back books (CBATG) and only publish paperbacks from now on. Apparently it’s a great loss that books are no longer pretty, nicely bound objects of beauty, and that they are now ‘disposable’ wrappings for stories, bound for the bin as soon as the spine snaps.

My initial reaction was kinda… meh.

Books are beautiful objects, it’s true. But I can’t really get excited about a book that exists merely as an object to be admired for its lovely jacket-covered craftsmanship. Books are beautiful because of their potential. Their beauty lies in the way that they can change you from what you were before you read it, to what you are once you finish (Hopefully for the better).

I actually find an old, worn book to be a more beautiful object than a pristine one in a bookshop. A dog-eared book with a gnarled, whitened spine is so much more of a beautiful object since it’s been out in the world, realising its potential from its true inner beauty.

That’s why I don’t own a bookmark. That’s why if you borrowed a book from me, you’d see lines in the corners from the dog-eared pages - frequent and worn on hard to read tomes and infrequent between chapters on the can’t-put-downers. That’s why a book that’s borrowed from me won’t quite sit flat on the table because the front pages have been wrapped round the back to accommodate its reader being squashed into a bus seat with knees raised up against the seat in front.

One of my favourite books is one I acquired years ago from an old friend. It’s a paper-back, swollen from an unfortunate encounter from a rainstorm, spine slightly flaking from being over-read. If you read it, you’ll find little pencil notes in the margin questioning the author, and mini post-its marking out bits that the book’s previous owner felt were somehow important.

Now there is a beautiful object. A book that has not only realised its beautiful potential time and again, but one which has accumulated its own story, written over its wrinkled face.

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