Hulver's site || Comments || Don't Bruise the Feeling

Anne Fadiman by ana (2.00 / 0) #26 Tue Apr 18, 2006 at 07:52:06 PM EST

in her essay Never do that to a Book, which is collected in Ex Libris, talks about two ways to love a book:

The chambermaid believed in courtly love. To her, the book's physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller. The Fadiman family believed in carnal love. To us, a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.

Yeah, zackly.

Can you introspect out loud? --CRwM
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: Yes! Love Like a Fadiman! by Christopher Robin was Murdered (2.00 / 0) #28 Tue Apr 18, 2006 at 08:36:20 PM EST

I love good books. And if it doesn't end with body parties looking a little disheveled, then it wasn't worth the name "love."

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: yep by Kellnerin (4.00 / 1) #30 Tue Apr 18, 2006 at 09:06:26 PM EST

I see it both ways, though. Book as artifact, and book as idea. I mean, it's the everything. The spark in the head, the words arranged in just that order, and -- if the next parts are done well -- the print and the paper and the binding and all. For any hardcover four-color book, someone went through a Pantone book and picked the color for the endpapers. Someone chose the cloth to cover it, under the dust jacket; the foil to stamp on it. The head and tail bands on the binding. It's not nothing.
The words can live anywhere, it doesn't matter: they're incorporeal. The book, the vessel, just has this one existence.

--
"later" meant either "when you walk around the corner" or "oatmeal."
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