Books are potent things. Samuel Taylor Coleridge told a story of the
peculiar effect a volume of The Arabian
Nights had upon him as a child, in the late 1770s: one tale, he writes,
made so deep an impression on me (I had read
it in the evening while my mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by
spectres, whenever I was in the dark—and I distinctly remember the anxious
& fearful eagerness, with which I used to watch the window, in which the
books lay—& whenever the Sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by
the wall, & bask, & read.
The book, charged with the ore of his own imagination, had become an
object of superstitious wonder for the future poet – and what a sense of
release comes in that final line, when he has taken it up: he is basking not
only in the sun, but in the radiance of his own reading. The book was a realm
of freedom, as well as fascination – and a contentious one, too. No doubt with
good intentions, Coleridge’s father ‘found out the effect, which these books
had produced—and burnt them’.
It is no coincidence that with the coming of the digital age, there
is (I’ve noticed) a renewed interest in books as objects: conferences on
bibliophilia are increasingly common in academic circles. The cover, the feel of the pages, the book’s
heft in the hand – the effects these can conjure should not be underestimated.
Let’s not forget that there is also romance in the e-reader: imagine the young
Coleridge catching sight of that slim, screened object in black, holding its
word-hoard.
Whether
printed or digital, whether fictive or factual, books are portals to other
worlds within our own, delivered in a uniquely intimate medium. They offer encounters
with difference – a liberation from the limits of the reader’s present knowledge
or present circumstances, which at the same time returns the reader to those
circumstances in an altered state. Whatever their form or subject, books reveal
that there is something else to see,
to imagine, to question, to be. Books teach their readers that any world –
including the one we walk around in, work in, worry in, laugh in, marvel in – is
just one possible world.
The book
has been a mutable object since its invention (itself a point impossible to pin
down): marks on a bone, indentations in clay, glyphs on papyrus, knots on a
quipu, runes on a bark-scroll, ink on a page, letters on a screen. The
so-called digital revolution is nothing so new, in many ways. The idea of the book is the real treasure,
though: one of humankind's greatest achievements. That is worth cherishing –
and should not be taken for granted. Nothing is so sure as change itself. The
trick is to direct that change in the way we would wish. As books themselves
teach, the actual is the possible – and the possible is actual.
This post will also appear at http://blogs.bcu.ac.uk/views/
