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Literary Review
Judging a book by its cover
I WOULD often hear T.G. Vaidyanathan, my teacher and book lover who died a year ago, tell me that he had bought a particular book for its physical beauty. He had no intention of reading it, he would tell me, as he caressed the book and put it back on the shelf. Once he had even cello-taped (the thin, transparent kind) the edges of a book whose cover he was smitten by, so that it would stay unopened. This is something I've never understood till recently — now I find myself buying books just for their covers or because the edition is beautiful. Browsing in bookshops has become a veritable feast for the eyes. Book jackets are an art form. In some cases, the book jacket is the best thing about a book. Sooner or later it happens to all book lovers: coveting books in a physical sense. For the way they look and feel. And smell. Time then to judge a book by its cover?
Books as objects. I must say they look good on the bookshelf. Bright, beautiful, shining (not shiny). And I don't even have to feel guilty that I won't be reading them because these were bought, in the first place, not to be read but to be looked and lusted at. Lately, I've been meeting other book lovers who have been doing likewise — and I must rush to add that this kind of books-adorning-our-bookshelves is not the same as that philistine practice common to so many of our homes where 25 books or so are displayed in the showcase (the top row is usually five or 10 volumes of an encyclopaedia followed by religious, self-help and health books, popular paperbacks, and Readers Digest Condensed Books) along with other trophies (recently I saw a computer in a showcase).
For the longest time I actually preferred second-hand books — mostly paperbacks — to new books. I could afford them and I loved the way they smelled. In India we've never had a culture of collecting hardbacks. Our bookstores stocked so few of them and they were — and still are — expensive. Paperbacks — new and old — is what we saw in abundance and that's what we bought and kept (quite proudly and contentedly) on our shelves. While in the West — and perhaps even in some parts of Asia, like Singapore — serious book collectors would only buy and collect hardbacks. To them, paperbacks were functional — to use and discard. Not anymore. Paperbacks look so good these days — those Vintage paperbacks, for instance (the work of Sonny Mehta of Alfred Knopf) are more exquisite than even hardbacks. The India Penguin paperback originals and the HarperCollins-Rupa paperbacks are wonderful to behold. I love their use of bright, bold, irresistible colours on the covers — yellow, pink, blue, purple, black — and the artful and pleasing way the cover design combines a photograph with an illustration.
It took me years to be weaned away from paperbacks (I missed the blurbs, for one thing) to hardbacks. But it is with the hardbacks that you really first encounter the physicality of books. It begins with their size and weight, their heft, and the way it feels in your hands. Then you become aware of the dust jacket (there's a way of reading a book with the dust jacket on which I'm yet to learn, so I take it off when reading on account of how it keeps slipping). The fascination with books as beautiful objects doesn't stop with dust jackets — it begins there. It's when you strip the book off its jacket that you see how elegantly crafted it is — paper, ink, cardboard, glue, thread and binding. For sometime now I've been delighting in hardback books with untrimmed fore-edges — making the book look and feel old; wonderful and priceless to the touch.
When it comes to handling books I confess that I am what Anne Fadiman in Ex Libris calls a courtly lover. As opposed to a carnal lover. The courtly lover is obsessed with keeping, maintaining and preserving a book in good condition. For the carnal lover a book's words are holy — not the paper, cloth, ink and binding. And so the carnal lover wantonly writes in margins and fly leafs, underlines passages, dog-ears pages and keeps books face down, straining the spine.
I didn't always use to be a courtly lover. Reading in school and college, I would often dog-ear pages and keep the book spread-eagled on the bed. The book as an object was invisible to me. Only the writing inside mattered. Now that I read less, I'm looking more at the book!
T.G. Vaidyanathan was another courtly lover. The subject of his first English Lit lecture in my M.A. class was on handling books. "First wash your hands, then dry them well. Now lightly apply some talcum powder to your palms, then pick up the book — that's how you keep from dirtying the covers of books. When you open a paperback, read it keeping the other side of the page upright or at a slight angle, never completely open — it creases the spine." He demonstrated with two paperbacks he had brought with him. "Also never, never cover a book the way you did your school books. But if you have to, use those transparent tracing sheets used by architecture students — that way the cover is still visible." Another friend of mine has such a reputation as a courtly lover of books that her friends ask her to baby-sit their books when they have to go away on long trips.
Lately I've been paying attention to a book's end-pages where the publisher tells you what kind of type the book is set in. "A Note on the Type" it will say, followed by something like: "This book was set in Monotype Dante, a typeface designed by Giovanni Mardesteig (1872-1977). Dante was originally cut only for hand composition by Charles Malin, the famous Parisian punch cutter, between 1946 and 1955. Dante is a thoroughly modern interpretation of the venerable face". Or, "The text of this book was set in a digitised version of Janson, etc." Printers and type composers take such pride and care in their craft and we seem to hardly notice. Books are more than beautiful objects on the bookshelf — they offer presence.
Email the writer at pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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