I have on my desk a beautiful, decaying pamphlet with “Grey’s Elegy” faded into the fronting green, mottled paper in a looping type that still displays some of the original gold. It’s spine has fallen off during one of the 101 years since “Mary” received it as a present on Dec. 25, 1913 — the back of the book’s first lithograph((A nicely bucolic riverside scene that fits the setting, if not the subject matter, of Thomas Grey’s 18th-century masterpiece “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (but perhaps gravestones sell fewer Christmas presents than birds and blossoms). )) is inscribed.
Published two years prior by The Hayes Lithograph Co., it’s come into my possession as a fragile shell. The pages are yellowed and the cover has become so attenuated it resembles a dried leaf that crumbles under my touch.
Anyone who know me knows that I love physical books, a newly significant retronym (like “tobacco cigarette” or “English muffin”) that had only redundant significance before the introduction of ebooks. Stating your preference for real books can carry the social connotations of mentioning that you don’t own a television, cue: exchange of knowing glance with like-minded friend, mutual imagination of speaker’s thoughts/motivations/vanities, etc.
In this glancing interlude, you and friend might imagine the luddite tree-hater sitting at home lost in the aesthetic experience of their books, weirdly fondling everything from old tomes of literary merit to Ayn Rand books as they sigh nostalgically and wish the Amazon Kindle might never have been assembled. They artfully arrange for Instagram their prettiest and most socially acceptable/unacceptable (depending on desired statement) in a studious yet absentminded way, with the same calculation boy bands use to achieve bedhead at any hour of the day. Add tea/beer/coffee/whisky (depending on desired statement). They probably want to have an extended conversation about “old book smell”! Run!
None of this is my intention. My acquired connoisseurship of books is not at the service of some old-timey affection, and it’s not a prescription that everyone needs to get in line with. A physical library is one way I’ve found to keep a lush, detailed record of my education and maturation. Every book I acquire came from some definite point, a used book store or a syllabus or a gift. I had some reason for adding each one to my shelf, and as I use it the book stands as an exterior account of who I was and what was important to me. The past comes with me as a reminder that every time I touch it, it changes, just a little, until the library stands as a history book of my own interaction with it. I can see “Grey’s Elegy” crack and decay every time I lift it, but the same if true in a gentler way for every book I own. I put a little of myself into the book whenever I read it.
The stacks of Christmas gifts((In a hardback copy of Ray Bradbury’s S is for Space: “For Pete, 1966, hope this kind of fiction gives you many hours of pleasure! Love, Tom & Marta”, received into Volume One July 2013 and sold for 15 dollars last spring.)) and hand-me-downs((Two separate people with atrocious handwriting signed the inside of The Elements of Philosophy by William A. Wallace, O.P., and you have to wonder how it made its way from St. John’s College, Annapolis, in 1979 to be priced at 6 dollars in 2012, again at Volume One.)) serve as a reminder that all of our books will one day belong to someone else, forever changed as artifacts of our interaction with them.
In his essay “Books as Furniture”, Nicholson Baker described the singular type of object that a book represents.
“Books fill vacant spaces better than other collectables, because they represent a different order of plenitude,” Baker wrote, “they occupy not only the morocco-bound spine span on the shelf, but the ampler stretches, the camel caravans of thought-bearing time required to read them through.”
Books, real books, get their covers torn and coffee spilled on them (or wine, again, depending on desired statement), and make each time you read a book, assimilating its words and argument into your thoughts, also a time that the book reads a bit of you. They are not our immortality, as Baker says noblemen once hoped, but they are a way of keeping ourselves honest. Their virtue, then, doesn’t lie in their beauty or traditionalness, or even the good-old work ethic it takes to read them instead of picking up an e-reader. They are good because they exist in the same space we do, not just as an outmoded means of flashing words in their correct order before our eyes, but as true artifacts of our physical life with them.
Chris McCaffery is a junior studying history and English. A student columnist for the Collegian, he is also minoring in journalism through the Dow Journalism Program.
