In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First; the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered; the Books Ditto When They Come Out In Paperback; Books You Can Borrow From Somebody; Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages; the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success; the Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment; the Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case; the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer; the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves; the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.
Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Reread and the Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.
A book. Especially old books. I don’t have many of them because I am very OCD about the condition of my books and I have to keep things just so when it comes to them, but old books have this… this earthly beauty that is nearly impossible to replicate. Old books have been through things, you know? They’ve seen things. They’ve felt things. I mean, God, I own a really old copy of The Wizard of Oz and when I was younger I would carry it around with me EVERYWHERE. School, the store, my grandmother’s house. The last page is full of ink stains because I cried every single time at the end. Some pages were bent and crinkled because I would stop there to reread sections that I loved or didn’t understand or stopped at to get a glass of juice. And I loved this book. I really did. I loved the smell of the pages and how the ink was a bit slanted on the paper. I loved that imperfection about it. How some words nearly ran off the page because the printing company understood how books would still be loved despite their flaws if they fall into the hands of the right person. Or child. I loved the crazy colour pictures because it was printed in the fifties and it only cost my mother about four dollars and I was so in love with this combination of paper and ink that I proudly told anyone who would listen that I was going to marry The Wizard of Oz. Of course, adults like to assume that they know children when they really don’t so I’m sure they all just thought I had a thing for wizened old men that govern imaginary places with even more unimaginably fictional characters.
Anyway. My point is, I loved this book more than anything. Even my parents, sometimes. I was a weird child in the sense that I preferred to be alone. I wanted to be liked, as I think most children do, but I didn’t want to be bothered with actually trying to form friendships that turn out to be as brief as a peal of laughter or a hug between a girl and boy when they’re young and figuring out cooties don’t actually exist. I wanted to sink into the foundations of this book. I wanted to become the story and my God, I just look at electronics like the Amazon Kindle and the nook from Barnes and Noble and I don’t think I could ever buy one of those. I need to feel the pages of a book sliding against my fingertips like whispery kisses from a lover. I like the weight of a book in my hands when it’s new and unopened and waiting for me to devour its words like a starving, dehydrated man would inhale water or food.
I just think that the love affair between a book and its owner is one of those quiet, beautiful things that one ever really notices.
