Book Love
June 12, 2011

For some people, book love outlasts many other kinds. Book love generally arrives early in life and if properly nurtured survives as long as we do. You are one of those people. So am I.

Which explains why when Book Love: A Celebration of Writers, Readers, and The Printed and Bound Book showed up on my doorstop about a couple of weeks ago I was unusually giddy. I adore books about books. In fact, those kinds of books might be called, as Anne Fadiman phrased it, my Odd Shelf. I own quite a few. It’s hard to pick out a few and call them “favorites,” but if I did these would certainly be among them:

• The Book on the Bookshelf, may favorite among all of Henry Petroski’s books, which was an amazing discovery to me since he writes about engineering problems and solutions. Engineering is a subject which I could not have ever imagined having an interest in until I discovered this (and, subsequently, his other books). It goes to show that an excellent writer can make any subject fascinating to anyone.
• Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, daughter of the famous writer and editor Clifton Fadiman, is very popular among bibliophiles, and deservedly so. The fifteen or so bookish essays touch on subjects familiar to anyone who loves book. They are full of humor, wit, intimacy, love, and passion. I never tire of rereading them.
• Of Reading Books by John Livingston Lowes (the link is to a new reprint in paperback) is a printed edition of an address that Lowes gave to two graduating classes, one at Simmons College on June 9, 1924, the other to Radcliffe College on June 18, 1924. It’s amusing to read in the second paragraph: “For we live an in an age and a land above all things marked by hurried motion.” Is it perception, I wondered when I first read this, or reality when we complain today about the speed and rush of our own lives.
• Reading: An Essay by Hugh Walpole is a collection of three essays about reading: Reading for Fun, Reading for Education, and Reading for Love. “No one can have a library,” he writers in the last section, “whether small of big, without realising almost painfully the active life of the books themselves. . . . I believe it then to be quite simply true that books have their own personal feeling about their place on the shalves. They like to be close to suitable companions, and I remember once on coming into my library that I was persistently disturbed by my JANE EYRE. Going up to it, wondering what was the matter with it, restless because of it, I only after a morning’s uneasiness discovered that it had been placed next to my Jane Austens, and anyone who remembers how sharply Charlotte criticized Jane will understand why this would never do.”
• I Have a Book by George and Eleanor Stewart is a practical how-to book written in a charming, bookish style. The subtitle—For those who like books and appreciate their decorative use in the home, but are embarrassed by lack of space—this book will perform some bookshelving miracles”—says it all, but what’s inside this 1940 first edition is not a decorating-with-books manual but rather a collection of ideas for creating rooms around books and their readers.
• Book Traveler (1973) by Bruce Bliven, Jf. is one of those wonderful unknown books you sometimes stumble across. So this one was with me. It’s a brief look at a man named George Scheer who worked as a commissioned traveling book salesman or traveler in the south and southwest for nearly three decades. The profession is probably extinct given the Internet, e-mail, fax machine, cell phone, and other modern communications, but oh, what a wonderful story this man’s job made. There have been other books by publishers’ reps, but this one stands out for its affectionate tone and amiable friendships between Scheer and the bookstore owners.

So when Book Love spilled out of its envelope I feel instantly and deeply in love. So would anyone who appreciates books about books or just loves literary quotations since that is what the book is, a literary companion or tribute to the original book form itself. A wonderful book-centric essay (the Prelude) opens with a note about what it is: “. . . a love letter from hundreds of writers and readers and their friends to the printed and bound book. We hear the book is in trouble. The e-reader is taking over like an invasive weed or mutant carp.”

The essay is far more elegant than crap carp, of course. But it’s obvious that the form of the book is the focus of this book. “Book Love is published for those who still love books, who hope . . . that books are “unkillable” and agree with Jason Epstein that ‘actual books will continue to be the irreplaceable repository of our collective wisdom’. The authors of the quotations that follow say all of this better than we ever could. Books are our history and our future. If they survive, we will too. Books, readers, writers—on this trinity we keep the faith.”

The remainder of the book are those quotes that are divided into three sections—Books, Readers, Writers. This is not a book for diving into for hours on end but for moments of needed refreshment. You sip this book. You savor each bite. You take in just enough to nourish you, to give you a smile, something to contemplate, or to argue. It’s like a house of good munchies. Take off the shelf what you want at any time. Enjoy it. And come back at your leisure. Because as Oliver Wendell Holmes said (and is quoted), “The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thoughts which it suggests.”

Upcoming Book Festivals:
Unfortunately, there are no book festivals coming up this week or next weekend.

The Pub House:
Horse & Buggy Press sounds like an old-fashioned publishing house full of old printing presses, men in ink-soaked aprons setting metal type, people banging away on non-electric typewriters, and editors with green eyeshades and red pencils hunched down over desks drenched in paper.

What it is, is an award-winning graphic design and letterpress studio established in North Carolina in 1996. They are not a book publisher per se as they work on a diverse range of print projects, but their books are special. (Nicki Leone writes about one extraordinary one, Southern Fictions, in Story Always Rises to the Top.) The editions are very limited and the books are made using the letterpress. Birdhouses is a beautiful collection of photographs taken across the southwest between 2002 and 2006 by Rob McDonald with a plastic “toy” Holga camera; the images are preceded by an essay about the project’s origins. The book itself is hand-sewn, letterpress printed on an eggshell-finish paper, and only 135 copies have been printed.

Imaging Books & Reading:
With summer vacations beginning, now is the time to think about what to take with you. What books to take with you, I mean. After all, as a bona fide member of the Vacation Reading Club, you would not want to be remiss in your duties!

Of Interest:
The New York Public Library needs you. They own about 40,000 restaurant menus in their Rare Book Division dating from the 1840s to the present, and they are asking for the public’s help in transcribing the menus, dish by dish. This will enable anyone to search out specific information about the dishes, prices, and organization of meals, a wonderful way to explore the world of food and culture. They’ve created a simple tool that makes the transcribing easy to do, but as you can imagine it will take lots of time. Since they’ll be blogging and weeting about interesting discoveries that come up along the way, and hopefully offering some fun visualizations of the data in the future, this isn’t going to feel much like work.  Your assistance would be very much appreciated so check out What’s on the Menu? or for more information you may contact them at menus [at] nypl.org.

Until next week, read well, read often and read on!

Lauren