Happy World Book Day! or Confessions of a Bibliophile
Torajirō Kojima, Woman Reading, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent
bib·li·o·phile
a person who collects or has a great love of books
I have a love-hate relationship with books. I read them. I buy them. I design them. I also own more books than I have shelf space for, and hate lugging them around when I sell them or move.
We didn’t have a lot of books in our house when I was growing up, so every book we did have felt precious. When I was in elementary school I joined the Scholastic Book Club. Their two-colour flyers arrived in our class once a month. I bought paperback classics like Black Beauty, David Copperfield, and the Sherlock Holmes stories and spent Saturday mornings lying in bed reading. I was also given books as gifts. I have a few of my childhood books and still enjoy their charming stories and beautiful illustrations. They’re like comfort food.
By my late teens books had become an obsession. I acquired so many books that, after I left home to go to school, I had to keep my collection in my parents’ basement. I continued to buy books as an adult and had to cull my collection frequently to keep it under control. Even so, I still had more books than would fit on my shelves. Books and bookshelves can compromise the structural integrity of a building’s floors and walls. They’re heavy and take up a lot of space. I’ve sold or donated dozens of boxes of books over the years. After lugging them to second-hand shops, it’s heartbreaking to get only pennies on the dollar for them.
bib·li·o·ma·ni·a
passionate enthusiasm for collecting and possessing books
In the early 2000s I started working as a book designer in publishing. It was an eye-opening experience. A publishing house is like a sausage factory. For every Wolf Hall, The English Patient, or The Joy of Cooking there are dozens of lesser-known books that may or may not stand the test of time. I snagged lots of free books but after a certain point they were just paper between boards. I began saying “no thanks” (sacrilege!) when a free copy of the latest publication was dropped off at my desk. My new self-imposed rule was that I was only allowed to own as many books as would fit in the three bookcases in my apartment.
tsun·du·ko
acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them
Marie Kondo suggests keeping no more than 30 books. I love Marie Kondo but her recommendation comes from growing up in a climate that is not kind to books. Moisture and humidity are the enemies of books. I learned the hard way that books stored in a damp basement will get musty and foxy. They like the same living conditions that we do. Keep them in a clean, warm, dry, well-ventilated space and dust them frequently.
I organize my bookshelves by category. I will never organize them by colour. And please, do not turn the spines of your books to the back. People who do this aren’t readers, they’re social media/interior decor trend-fashion victims!
an·ti·li·bra·ry
a collection of books that are owned but have not yet been read
A look inside Umberto Eco’s antilibrary
E-readers
An e-reader is a great space-saving device. You might think that a designer who specializes in print would take offence at the very notion of digital books but I have owned two e-readers, loaded with classic novels by authors like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, all in the public domain and downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg.
My mother was an avid reader. When, late in life, her mobility became limited and she could no longer visit the library, I gave her my e-reader. She enjoyed being able to download even more free e-books via her computer.
Be careful if you register an e-reader that has free e-books on it. After I registered my old Kindle, Amazon automatically loaded software onto it that blocked my free e-books, rendering them unreadable. Grrrr! I invested in a Kobo and keep it offline.
If you’ve ever wondered why e-books aren’t much cheaper than printed books, it’s because the cost of printing a physical book is small in comparison to the total cost of producing it. The real “fixed” cost of publishing a book is in the writing, editing, design, publicity, marketing, and sales.
Your local library and independent bookstore
Get friendly with your local library. Public libraries have many resources beyond books: newspapers and magazines; e-books and audio books; CDs and DVDs; online movies and television; online courses; and digitized photographs and other archival material. Request a book or other media and put it on hold or have it transferred to your neighbourhood branch. If the book you are looking for isn’t available locally, request the book through an interlibrary loan. Your library can source the book through library systems across Canada. When I lived in Toronto I used the Toronto Public Library website so much I had my library card number committed to memory.
Amazon and big box bookstores (I’m not naming any names!) have forced the closure of many small stores. Support your local independent bookstore. They need all the help you can give them. If you go to London (UK!), visit Cecil Court, nicknamed “Booksellers’ Row.” It is a short pedestrian street chock-a-block with secondhand and antiquarian bookshops. Around the corner and up Charing Cross Road is Foyles’ flagship store. Be mindful of the extra weight in your luggage if you buy books abroad.
https://secretldn.com/cecil-court-history/
Censorship and book burning
In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel about a society that has banned books, fireman don’t put out fires, they burn books. According to Bradbury, 451°F is the temperature at which paper catches fire. At the end of the novel, the protagonist, a former fireman, joins a group of book lovers in the forest, each of whom has memorized their favourite book in preparation for the day when books will no longer be banned. Each member of the group is known not by their name but by the title of the book they have memorized. The novel was turned into a film by the late French filmmaker François Truffaut. I have always found the last scene incredibly moving. Set in autumn and winter, members of the group move through the forest repeating the text of their books to themselves, or teaching their book to a younger generation.
When I was writing this piece I discovered to my horror that a book I had worked on, Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, had been the subject of protests in the Netherlands. Protesters burned the book cover over objection to the word “Negroes,” or rather its Dutch translation, in the title which is taken from a historical document titled “Book of Negroes.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/dutch-group-burns-cover-of-hill-s-book-of-negroes-1.887175
From the fatwa and attack against Salman Rushdie, to the bowdlerization of Roald Dahl, and the removal of books from American school libraries, religious and political extremism on both the right and the left are every day threatening freedom of speech. In the words of Lawrence Hill, “There is no defence to burning a book. It’s a hateful act designed to intimidate.... It’s something that stifles dialogue and the notion of the freedom to read and to write.”
Books about books:
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Helene Hanff, 84 Charing Cross Road
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
And bring no book: for this one day
We’ll give to idlenessFrom “To My Sister” by William Wordsworth