Books

I've written about our household library before, I'm sure. It's still growing. As Ms Che was collecting her MFA in creative writing she bought dozens of books of poetry, but since they don't take up a lot of room, the bulk of them hardly groans on a single shelf in "her office." The rest of the books, numbering several thousand (I'd say 3.25) are scattered around the house, and some are still in the boxes we transported them in from California. They're in the garage and a couple of storage buildings in the back of the property.

As I've watched some of the renovation shows on TeeVee and looked at magazines and the internet for renovation ideas (our house is crying out for another do over, and we're getting the debt down so we can) I see that books are often used as "decor", props. They're turned spine to the wall, so you only see the page edges. They're covered with pastel colored paper, wall paper, white paper, cream paper, and they're arranged by color on otherwise bare shelves. Or on shelves with scattered bits of pottery or other collections. You don't see titles. There aren't any titles. Books made to be there but do nothing except take up space. They're not to be read, not to be browsed; they're to be looked at, glanced at, blankly stared at.

There was a period not too long ago when people with too much money and not much sense bought old leatherbound books by the yard, books in foreign languages that had beautiful bindings, books with no content just beautiful bindings, books ancient and decrepit that couldn't be read because the pages were falling apart, but the bindings were beautiful, and they filled their shelves with them. And then there was the fashion for hanging wall paper with images of full bookshelves instead of having the books on shelves take up valuable room. 

They say books aren't being published, sold, or read any more. "Almost all content is delivered electronically, digitally." That may be true. I don't know. I pulled out my somewhat tattered copy of Lost Horizon the other day and quoted from it on these (digital) pages. I did a quick digital search before doing so, and I could not find the quote I used from the preface of the 1936 edition. There were a couple of truncated versions, but none that gave the whole quote -- which is itself condensed (by the author) from a rather longer conversation between the main character Connolly and the High Lama of Shangri La. Consequently I reconfirmed the notion that the printed book continues to have value above and beyond whatever appears digitally in its place.

A lot of our books are old and not in the best of condition -- somewhat like we are! -- and some I know, like a 19th century Dickens collection, are almost unreadable because the pages have become so brittle. There are some Tom Swift novels in similar condition, as well as a bunch of Horatio Alger books that literally flake to pieces when you open them. It's possible, though I can't be sure, that most or even all of these works are available electronically. The physical book has a presence, a reason for being, but if it can't be read because it is disintegrating, what good is it, really?

Our oldest books, though, books of poetry from 1801 and 1802, are in surprisingly good condition (the pages anyway, the leather bindings not so much.) The pages are rag paper, crisp but not delicate, and the printing is handset and sure. These books will last long enough for the poetry style they present to come back into fashion, say another couple of hundred years.

We have a lot of art books, some of them becoming sought after like early Andy Warhol and David Hockney books. I've been watching The Andy Warhol Diaries on Netflix and oh my, talk about temps perdu. It had never occurred to me that Andy had become such a historical rather than contemporary character. The book of his works I'm thinking of (can't find it right now but I know we brought it here) is from the mid-'60s and contains images of much of his work up till then, including the advertising illustrations he did in the '50s and some of his "dirty movies" in the '60s. Acquaintances of ours in Sacramento owned a number of his works, including the famous Marilyn and Elizabeth Taylor silk screens, as well as other less well known Warhols. I don't remember now exactly how they acquired them. Some were from a gallery in New York, I think, but I remember vague references to direct dealings with the artist. It may have been in reference to some other artist though.

Many of our books will never be read again, I'm sure, and most of them, I have little doubt, will be discarded after we leave here. Maybe some will be used for "decor", cut up and used for wall paper, or as might need be, burned for warmth. 

Books are said to be out of favor. Unnecessary burdens on modern life. Well, if that's the case.... we might do well to question, again, the value of "modern life."