Book Love

I think I’ve surprised myself of late–I’ve become an unwitting book perv. Maybe it’s all this talk of rubbery Kindles and aluminium-brushed iPads that has me longing for the leathery musk of a russety old hardback with faded gold lettering. Ok, well, not exactly. Being the unabashed cheapskate that I am, hardbacks are more a luxury I only periodically or accidentally fall into ownership with. I’m generally much more of a grubby paperback guy, although not necessarily by choice. Though I long for yard upon yard of cyclopean, mahogany bookshelves brimming with identical, burgundy hardbacks as much as the next man, sometime you just want to read the damn book already.

In terms of senses, Id’ve thought touch to merely be limping weakly ahead of hearing in relation to bibliophilia, but it does actually influence how I feel about a great many of my books. A recent-ish paperback printing of Berryman’s Dream Songs that I had delivered came with the unfortunate texture of what can only be described as the product of some unholy union of open-minded iguana and prodigiously fertile sandpaper. God, just brushing the front cover must’ve sloughed off at least 4 weeks’ worth of dead skin cells. As far as I know, it’s the only Pulitzer prize-winning work to also double as a loofah. By comparison, the Paris Review Interviews are a ragtag dichotomy: silky smooth matt cover with stylised, gloss punctuation marks, printed on delicate paper with edges so ragged as to suggest someone lost the scissors down at the printing office. Thing is, it’s not even zigzaggy in the way that newspaper edges are, they’ve just all simply been (admittedly skilfully and relatively straight mind you) ripped by hand.

As for the whole eBook thing, well, of course, this is where I’m supposed to step in and wheedle disconsolately about the unmistakeable rustle of golden brown pages or the delightful whimsy of the chirpy stick figures bumming in the margins and so on. No, I don’t really give too much of a toss about that. I just think that their imposition of the iPod model onto books is rather a clumsy transposition all told. They’re not just things that go in different holes of the head, despite what Toby and Emily in marketing might think. While we might conjure up a heady playlist of singles from various albums for our 2 hour flight, I find it hard to believe that people will be throwing in chapter 7 of a Henry James novel before segueing into some hardcore Jilly Cooper. Admittedly, this may well work for poetry – anthologies on the go and all that – but, let’s be honest, we mostly read in slow rotations, and I can’t ever say that I’ve needed more than 3 unread novels for a holiday, and even that’s relatively indulgent. But even if it were appealing to people to do so, the model is still not the same, and here we come to the fundamental point: although it was admittedly a monumental pain in the arse, with my iPod I just ripped all of my CD library to iTunes and went from there. With ebooks – no such thing. Right back at the start buddy. Get to the back of the line and flex those buying muscles, because if you really want to see the imperious splendour of those yards of bookshelf condensed into that wee little handheld boxy, well, you’d best get your wallet out pal.