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osprey_archerAnne Fadiman’s Ex Libris is a book of essays about books—not reviews of books, or discussions of the ideas of books, but essays that are love letters to the hedonistic pleasures of books: the joy of possessing books and finding new books and housing and organizing never-ending stacks of books.
It’s like food writing, except about books. It has the same intense attention to sensual details and it made me want to hike half a mile to the nearest used bookstore, the equivalent of salivating over a well-described loaf of bread. (There actually is an essay about food writing. She quotes Keats’ description of a nectarine, which “melted down [his] throat like a large Beatified strawberry.” Beatified. What an adjective.)
It’s probably a book only a book-lover could love, if only for the frisson of recognition. This quote, for instance: “These beautiful volumes had been published in 1897, and not a single person had read them. I had the urge to lend them out to as many friends as possible in order to make up for al the caresses they had missed during their first century.”
I have so been there. Because a book, despite appearances, is not really an inanimate object. It’s a semi-sentient being, which will care about being unloved or abused. (Another quote: “George, if you ever break the spine of one of my books, I want you to know you might as well be breaking my own spine.”) I think this attitude is peculiar to book people; philatelists, for instance, don’t generally believe their stamps to be imbued with their own anima.
Also, how many books are there where you run into words like “concatenation?” For that alone, it’s worth reading.
Also, I found a book icon. There's an lj community called![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
book_icons. Happiness!
It’s like food writing, except about books. It has the same intense attention to sensual details and it made me want to hike half a mile to the nearest used bookstore, the equivalent of salivating over a well-described loaf of bread. (There actually is an essay about food writing. She quotes Keats’ description of a nectarine, which “melted down [his] throat like a large Beatified strawberry.” Beatified. What an adjective.)
It’s probably a book only a book-lover could love, if only for the frisson of recognition. This quote, for instance: “These beautiful volumes had been published in 1897, and not a single person had read them. I had the urge to lend them out to as many friends as possible in order to make up for al the caresses they had missed during their first century.”
I have so been there. Because a book, despite appearances, is not really an inanimate object. It’s a semi-sentient being, which will care about being unloved or abused. (Another quote: “George, if you ever break the spine of one of my books, I want you to know you might as well be breaking my own spine.”) I think this attitude is peculiar to book people; philatelists, for instance, don’t generally believe their stamps to be imbued with their own anima.
Also, how many books are there where you run into words like “concatenation?” For that alone, it’s worth reading.
Also, I found a book icon. There's an lj community called
book_icons. Happiness!
