Okay, enough of this depressing post at the head of my blog. Because, as my friend the Puffin notes, this work matters very much indeed.
Some of you may have twigged to the fact that I’m a little addle-brainedly obsessed with books. For the nonce, I am particularly obsessed with one particular book, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what it’s doing or how to write about it.
I have written before about my tendency to get mired in Big Questions, usually a tremendous problem, especially for a wee little ‘phyte like me. However, this time my big question is devilishly simple and beguilingly pretty, so I am going to indulge myself, and ask you to enable my self-indulgence. Posing questions on this blog has gone well once before, so I ask another:
What is a book?
No, really. What is a book? What do books do? How different are they from script, and why does this difference matter? What do books mean to you? Why do you spend time with books? Why do we sit idly by at the movies and watch thousands of human beings get mown down, while (pace Dance) if we catch so much as a whiff of a burning book, our hearts break and we begin to wail and gnash our teeth?
This question is more rife for the earlies and medievalists out there, and brings back that other big question about the past and its alterity, and what we can learn from it. My attitudes about books have certainly changed dramatically since I started playing with very old ones. But I want to hear from everyone.
Really. What is a book?
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December 24, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Sisyphus
On a far less profound note than what all the actual scholars will say, a book is a new form of technology.
December 24, 2007 at 7:10 pm
renaissance girl
Would it be too goofy to say “Communion”?
SIR, more than kisses, letters mingle souls,
For thus, friends absent speak.
—TO SIR HENRY WOTTON, John Donne
December 25, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Hannah
Life. In all the glory and terror and sheer diversity that it contains, written down on a page. A page which straddles a line between being ephemeral and forever. Nothing more substantial than a collection of thoughts and phrases, but something that gains substance with every reading. Something valuable – to be bought and never read, kept in a library, circulated amongst trusted friends, and worried over. Something real and needed – the thing that kept you sane that once. An innovation, scary and worrisome. New and new-fangled and a herald of all that is going to change, that had already changed and that was never as stable as you thought. Easy to mess up, to collate wrongly, to include something wrong in, to claim as your own for whatever reason. Something stable and there for the rest of time. Something lost to the memories of time and only found in reference and quotation.
December 25, 2007 at 6:24 pm
neophyte
Sis, this is why we love you — and yes, I love that bit.
Hannah, I love how ecstatic you are.
RG — No! By which I mean, yes! I think that’s exactly what my wacko Marians are up to, or at least that’s what they think they’re up to. Where I get confused is wondering whether the book might not be up to something different — plotting surreptitiously in the corner of the printshop or of some gentleman’s library, or mounting open rebellion in St Paul’s churchyard, or writing the plays of Shakespeare…
December 26, 2007 at 12:20 am
Hannah
I got hooked at an early age. I blame my mother. Over exposure to the written word as a child evidently does strange things to a girl.
December 26, 2007 at 6:26 pm
The Bittersweet Girl
The irony of the question is that, for most of us, the best way to answer the question is to make recourse to our beloved books.
Here’s a positively modern (nineteenth century!) take, from the brilliant mind of Emily Dickinson:
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human soul.
On the heels of your last post, of course, one is tempted to say: books are solace.
December 26, 2007 at 7:23 pm
neophyte
I’m curious about something that’s happening in both Hannah’s and BG/Dickinson’s responses (yes, I like to think that Emily Dickinson comments on my blog) — the conflation of text and book, and the difficulty of discerning which is doing what.
What Dickinson describes is almost true of any text — be it manuscript, unbound leaves, electronic, engraved, or howsoever. What’s interesting is the materialization executed by the figures of the vessels, and the extraordinary liveness of the “Coursers.” But, I suspect, for her it is the words that prance and take and bear, and not paper and ink and binding glue and calfskin (or whatever those space-age Victorians were using).
What I like about Hannah’s ecstatic bookishness is that she shifts easily between text and object, and the two seem to be united for her.
I don’t have answers to this (hence the question). But what I love more and more about this history of the book stuff is realizing that my early moderns — More, Erasmus, Milton, the stationers — they knew what books were, and how to use them. We have forgotten, I think, but they knew. And they’re starting to tell me.
December 27, 2007 at 1:12 am
Tenured Radical
You got to read Tony Grafton’s The Footnote. Got to. I said so on yr. last post, but give me a yell on Zenith email & we’ll see if we can get together 2 catch up.
TR
December 27, 2007 at 10:32 am
Hannah
You caught me a little deranged after having been considering pamphlets and what they mean for the print marketplace. A lucky coincidence of thought.
December 29, 2007 at 2:16 am
Dance
The Footnote was a ton of fun.
Random notes on text vs. book, in case they trigger something deeper from others—I’m literally physically addicted to the movement of eyes over text, which at least gets us away from the content and into the object. I don’t quite know why, though.
My mother the online bookseller says that the “book as object” is the province of booksellers and collectors—focusing on the binding, first editions, author signatures, dustjackets, condition…
My old boss the digital archivist always said that no one had yet invented a better long-term storage medium than the book.
My mother gave me a signed Terry Pratchett for Christmas, and honestly, tears came to my eyes. The book makes tangible the voyages that ED extolled, lets us capture them.