THE SENSUOUS BIBLIOPHILE

posted by James Reel

    In the book review section of Sunday’s New York Times, Ben Schott advocated doing things to books that would bring long prison terms if you did them to children or animals. Didn’t his mommy ever teach him how to take care of things? I really have low tolerance for books that aren’t in pristine condition, which is why I don’t patronize used-book stores anymore. My wife, on the other hand, has been known to splatter pages with little bits of her breakfast, and keep books in the spine-cracking face-down open position for hours. Once she even dropped a copy of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita into an airport toilet, yet continued to read the thing. It’s a wonder the marriage has survived all these decades.
    About 10 years ago, for a now-defunct literary e-zine, I wrote an essay on the sensual pleasures of bibliophilia, which I now resurrect for your pleasure. (Warning: Statistics and cultural references may be long out of date.) The following essay is rated R for sexual innuendo.

    WE BIBLIOPHILES LIKE TO THINK of ourselves as several cuts above the television addict, intellectually and perhaps morally. Reading connects us to a wider world of ideas than does lowest-common-denominator TV programming; the act of moving our eyes across a page and processing the words thereon engages us more fully than sitting passively before the tube. And so on. Or, as the TV fan would say, yadda yadda yadda.
    Yet, in our relationships with books themselves, we turn out to be every bit as vulnerable to sensory stimulation—not to mention every bit as manipulative, domineering, and even perverted—as the average drooling couch potato whose greatest contribution to society is to withdraw from it.
    Inveterate readers can be ghouls. We peruse mail-order lists of remaindered books, tsk over the brief shelf life of certain admired authors, and stifle a whimper of outrage that their worthy hardcovers are being sacrificed so quickly in the hope that cheap paperback incarnations will keep the titles active a few more months. But then we remember that we can now acquire this stuff for one-quarter the list price. Bring on the order blank, and the schadenfreude.
    It's like visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, reverently poring over the inscribed names, then zipping over to Arlington National Cemetery to dig up a few graves.
    All right, so it isn't that awful. We are, after all, discussing books, which, despite our sentimental fantasies, are merely commodities. Yet they can seem so much more than that—not when their titles are listed in some catalog, or when their bibliographic information surfaces during a journey to the mighty Amazon.com, but when wood pulp actually meets fingertips.
    Nowhere is this more true than in a bookstore. Libraries, too, are good places to come face to fascicle with a fine volume, but there the encounter is fleeting. At a library you meet a nice book, escort it out to lunch, engage it in a desultory two-week affair, but you cannot grow old with that book beside you. Soon it must return to the library shelf, ready for the next pick-up. Eventually, through its habitual promiscuity, the library book will lose its freshness, trade its glitzy, commercial but fragile binding for something sturdy and generic, and begin to smell. The library is a brothel of books.
    A bookstore, in contrast, lures the reader who is both inquisitive and acquisitive. No book is more seductive than when it beckons from the retail shelf, because it can be not merely borrowed, but possessed. And so can the book next to it, and the books across the aisle. Used and antiquarian volumes have their allure, but new books are particularly irresistible. The bindings are stiff, the pages white and crisp. The novels don't automatically fall open to the sex scenes.
    During a recent 24-hour visit to Portland, Oregon, I made my first pilgrimage to what is often called the finest bookstore west of the Mississippi, Powell's City of Books. It was a quick tour—I'd fed the parking meter enough to satisfy it for only 42 minutes, and didn't realize the store had its own free garage until I was driving away. The rain came down heavily that morning; perfect weather for book browsing. For the lover of books, rain is the ultimate make-out music.
    Powell's purveys one million new and used volumes in its 43,000 square feet. Yet—and this is essential for a bookstore, something that well-intentioned chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble can't manage—the place felt intimate. It was sectioned off into many rooms on different levels, and the shelves rose high toward the ceiling. Here, you felt you could be alone with a book for a few minutes, getting to know it privately before making what could be a life-long commitment.
    (In case you're wondering, I made it out with only three books: Peter Esterhazy's novel The Book of Hrabal, which I'd specifically sought, and a couple of cookbooks encountered by accident, one of them devoted to vegetarian Lebanese cuisine. I elected not to lug home the hefty, newly-issued second volume of the Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages because I was already traveling with several books. One of them was Bernard Malamud's A New Life, a wonderful campus satire set in a fictionalized version of Oregon State University in Corvallis, which was my next destination. And, yes, judging from the preponderance of aggie-jock buildings, the school still seems to be the same liberal arts-deficient place Malamud skewered four decades ago. And the central town is just as lovely, and the surrounding farmland and mountains as compelling, as Malamud described.)
    So we commit to a book, and purchase it. Or, more likely, we purchase several, polygamously. (Those of us who restrict ourselves to reading one book at a time might be more charitably regarded as serial monogamists.) Then, when we get our lovely acquisitions home, what horrors we subject them to.
    Some of us crowd them into unstable piles in the corner, on a chair, or under a bed, without thought of preserving their physical integrity. Others force them to stand straight up on hard boards, sometimes even insisting that their spines be perfectly aligned side by side. (I count myself as one such tyrant, as do the people at the world headquarters of Bancroft & Associates, the not entirely disinterested [original] presenters of this column.)
    Oh, and the abuse some books must endure: marking, staining, ripping, page-folding, spine-cracking.
    This is the price the book must pay for being a desirable physical object—a commodity. Of course, we also value the book for its intellectual content, which provides this form of physical gratification a dimension not associated with rolling naked in money or frolicking with erotic toys. Yet, fundamentally, it is the book's corporeality that attracts us right there in the store or library. Otherwise, we'd read the classics strictly online, and seek the latest fiction only at the cineplex.