The book is extraordinary technology. Computers may be touted increasingly as its successor, but in terms of portability, display options, storage density and access modes, they still come a very poor second. And even when these technical shortcomings have been addressed, computers will never entirely supersede the book.
For the book has a unique and irreplaceable attribute: its physicality. The act of picking up a book is beautifully apt: it offers you the promise of reaching out and taking all that lies within. Balanced on the palm of your hand, a book almost throbs with potential like a mighty mental engine, its intellectual content manifest in its weight. And fanning through its pages can be as satisfyingly cathartic as telling beads or spinning a prayer wheel, a catharsis that comes from a simple bodily action tapping into a complex symbolic one.
That physicality also gives books a scale quite separate from their abstract stature, one which allows us to relate to them directly, with our bodies. In this sense, no book is inhuman. Most are comfortingly domestic: small enough to carry around and easy to read; giant tomes may impress by their size and bulk, but they never threaten; and the tiniest books, virtuoso artefacts of a miniature world, emphasise the essential gift of the medium: that of so much being held in so little.
Through its physical presence, the book offers not just informational content but also the experience of its mediation - the outward form becomes an attribute as key as the plot line it transmits. Some of my most vivid memories of reading are of books whose appearance was an indissoluble part of the whole encounter.
For example the black, brooding covers of the Wessex edition of Thomas Hardy's novels already hint at and form part of the story of human sadness and despair which lie within. Similarly, the layout, typeface and paper of The Oxford Illustrated Dickens have shaped my image of his world as much as Hablot K. Browne's characteristic representation of the characters. Even my reaction to the unencompassable Shakespeare has been tinged by the nature of first complete edition of his works that I bought: it cost just 9/6d, was printed on thick, crude stock in tiny, dense type laid out in endless columns like wallpaper; and yet the mere thought of it still suggests the spine-shivering plenitude of his achievement.
This obsession with books as objects is not new. Nor is it simply a matter of a bibliophile's delight in fine bindings or crisp printing. Petrarch treasured a copy of Homer in the original Greek - of which he could read not a word; the content alone - inaccessible to him, but somehow present nonetheless - endowed the book with a magic which raised it above all others. I, too, have found myself buying books not to read them, but simply to have them because of what they contain. It is as if owning them gave us their knowledge. This clearly reaches right back to the most primitive response to books, a fear of their inexplicable power, and a desire to master them by possession. Implicit in this ancient fear is an amazement, a huge, ancient wonder at the miracle of their bookness.
(27.10.89)
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