The tactile pleasure of books
As I publish this post, I'm on day seven of a five week writing/creative retreat in the glorious Adelaide Hills in South Australia. I spent some of the favourite years of my childhood here in a small cottage that overlooked a walnut grove with views up to the eastern flanks of Mt Lofty. My one-bedroom abode is 5-10 minutes drive away from our old home, but the garden, the outlook, the wood fire, the small neatness of my temporary home have brought the memories and the feelings flooding back. It is pretty chilly (at least compared to winter at home in Perth) but I love that too. I find cold weather energising - and it gives me an excuse to wear jumpers (sweaters to my US friends), coats and boots - my favourite style of clothing. It's so comfortable and familiar here that I had started writing only a few hours after I settled in! It just feels right.
The view from my cosy, writing retreat
Given that I'm on a writing retreat over 2000km away from home, I was faced with a quandary. What to do about my books?? I couldn't spend all this time crafting paragraphs without some of my key books to hand. Granted, I do have a lot of my research as e-books and PDFs, but the books I refer to over and over again I prefer in physical form. There is something about flicking through the pages of a book and alighting on a new idea (or an old one that seems new when you change the context) that just can't be reproduced in electronic form. So I did my research and found that Australia Post could ship a 5kg box for a relatively modest price. Hmmm - 5kg was not enough. I would need two boxes. I packed these with the precision of someone who creates intricate, geometric embroidery designs for a living (haha!) and shipped one that was 4.9kg and a second that was 4.85kg.
So last night found me flicking through a few familiar favourites and planning my next writing task. Which is when it hit me. I could write about the sheer tactile gloriousness of books. Oh bliss! I had just given myself permission to spend a whole day musing on the connection between our hands and books.
A favourite book that I couldn’t leave at home!
The form of the modern book emerged from the codex - a collection of sheets bound on one side. This format had the advantage of making the written words more easily accessible when compared with being buried deep in the middle of a scroll (the information is defined as "random access" in the former as opposed to "sequential access" in the latter). The modern book is technically a codex but the term is generally reserved for ancient manuscripts with pages typically made of vellum, papyrus, parchment, and other materials. Codices were bound on one side using various methods and the content was hand written. Already, these ancient precursors to the modern book are a testament to the sheer wonder of the human hand. A single ancient codex needed numerous pairs of hands to make the physical pages, to laboriously scribe the content often with elaborate decorations and symbols added, and then bind them together into a completed form.
The time invested in these books made them rare and expensive. They were the preserve of the rich, educated, powerful upper echelons of society. The advent of the printing press in the 1500s of course changed all that, gradually leading to the modern day where books are cheap and widely available to everyone. The landscape has further changed in recent decades with the advent of digital books in the form of e-books and audiobooks. A quick Google search reveals a plethora of articles discussing the pros and cons of these different media formats. There was an expectation at one point that e-books might kill the printed book market altogether. Whilst it is true that physical book stores are less numerous than they once where, this is more likely due to the impact of large online booksellers rather than the loss of interest in physical books. A study by PEW Research in the US (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/01/06/three-in-ten-americans-now-read-e-books/) shows that "American readers are spreading their book consumption across several formats", but print books still hold a significant share of the market. Amongst a survey of 1502 adults, the research found that 32% read print books only, 33% read print and digital books, 9% read digital books only, and 23% read no books. Physical books are still very much part of the modern world, which makes me very happy.
What is it about a book in physical form that is so attractive? Maybe it's the weight of the book in your hands. It has a sense of gravitas which anchors you whilst you are reading. Perhaps it is the feel of the paper, smooth or textured, as you turn the pages or run your finger down a page. Could it be a beautiful cover made of leather or fabric, or embossed with a design that has your fingers lazily running backwards across the ridges as you read. Maybe it's a well loved book from your childhood that shows the wear and tear of being read over and over again, evidence of your hands repeatedly returning to favourite words. Or it's a book handed down to you by a family member and thus it carries the imprint of their hands whenever you read it. One of my personal favourites is the book as a gift - given or received - that links you to another person just by the act of having shared the words and ideas it contains. So precious are these, that I can often tell you exactly who gave me a particular book, even if the flyleaf bears no inscription.
Then there are bookshops. If you are a book lover (and I have a feeling that many of you are!), then you know the exquisite joy of entering a bookshop. One of my favourite ways to spend an hour is to wander among the shelves, picking up books that might be of interest, idling flicking through the pages or reading the first few paragraphs, and deciding if this is a book I want to own or not. Of course, frequently there are lots of books I want to own (!!), but part of the fun is making a choice. Will today's selection be a book about philosophy or science or creativity, or maybe a work of fiction that allows me to escape to another world? Perhaps it will be a book about embroidery or craft (although let's be honest, I own *a lot* of those already!). And then there is the joy of bringing the volume home and sitting down with a cup of tea to read it more seriously, becoming familiar with the content and the feel of the book - hands, mind and paper working together to play with the exchange and processing of ideas.
Secondhand bookshops bring their own special version of the book purchasing pleasure. The clue is in the name. These books have already been owned and handled by previous pairs of hands. This previous ownership and the aging paper creates a distinctive smell. People often talk about the smell of books, but for me the secondhand bookshop is a particular version of that. I love opening a pre-loved book to find a handwritten inscription and wondering about the people who wrote it, even more so when a date is included and I imagine where I was in my life (or maybe not even born yet!) when the note was added.
Then there are libraries which provide yet another avenue for indulging my love of books. As a child, living in that tiny cottage only minutes away from where I am now writing, we would make a regular pilgrimage to the Adelaide library. This involved a bus ride into the city, the walk to the library, returning the books we borrowed the last time and then a happy hour or so selecting new ones. Before the bus ride home, we would often go to a cafe for afternoon tea or an early dinner. And of course, now the borrowed books could be taken out and shared with my Mum and sister as we talked about what we had found. Library books are different to bought ones - they don't have the same level of commitment. If you don't like one, you can easily return it. Thus, I have often found myself borrowing books that I would never expect to purchase, just to try them on for size.
In the last couple of years I've discovered another aspect of books and hands which I love - making my own. As an embroiderer, I often find myself wondering what to do with some of my finished pieces. Using them as the cover of a book is a particular favourite. I started out by making slipcovers but this eventually graduated to handbound books and the process has become somewhat addictive. There is something so satisfying about choosing all the materials to match my embroidery: fabric to match my stitching, patterned paper or card to line the front and back covers, the weight and style of paper to form the pages, and the thread that will bind everything together. Then the form of the finished book needs to be considered - size, binding style, how the pages will lie. Stitching the pages together is by far my favourite part. It's so different to my usual style of embroidery. It needs extra firm tension and large, sturdy needles to ensure that the pages in the finished book don't slip around. But the satisfaction of seeing a geometric pattern emerge on the spine is the same - I just love the way the thread, pages and covers become a beautiful piece of book art.
In a full circle return to the ancient codex, hand bound books can have pages filled with your own handwriting or drawings. I've had one student who used the method to bind together some of her favourite musical scores. Another one had a collection of writing by her father. The front and back covers were encased in fabric that had once been part of a favourite item of his clothing. Yet another bound together some of her felt samples so that she had a ready reference for her different experiments with fibres and materials, as well as a beautiful book in its own right. The ability to make these books special, to add even more touches from your own hands or those you love, makes them a truly wonderfully reflection of human creativity. And if they are filled with blank pages, then they are ready for you or someone else to fill them with handwriting, drawings, or collected ephemera.
The connection between our hands and the physical books we read is so obvious that we rarely stop to think about it. And yet in a very real sense, our hands are the conduit between our brain and the words, ideas and images recorded in the pages. They enable us to dive into the middle of a book in search of a specific point, to randomly flick open to a page and be surprised by the content, or to start at the beginning and patiently work our way, page by page, to the end. I for one wouldn't be without them.
(As a reward for writing this post, I went to my favourite Adelaide Hills bookshop - Matilda Bookshop in Stirling. I haven't managed to visit there yet without buying a book - or two - and I didn't break the pattern this time. It is entirely possible that three 5kg boxes will be required for my return home!)
This Week’s References
History of books - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_books
Codex - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex
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