will read for food

the library

The great idea behind Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series is that what happens in fiction is real. This is something we’ve all suspected at some gut level. There is just no way, once we’ve closed the book, that Jane and Mr. Rochester ceased to exist. They are too solid, they live, they breathe. We may not be looking, but we have no doubt that their lives go on, off the page.

So what is a library, then but a waystation for traveling from reality to reality? What would such a way station look like?

I closed the book and carefully placed it in my pocket and looked around. I was in a long, dark, wood-paneled corridor lined with bookshelves that reached from teh richly carpeted floor to the vaulted ceiling. The carpet was elegantly patterened with geometric designed and the ceiling was decorated with sculpted reliefs that depicted scenes from the classics, each cornice supporting the marble bust of an author. High above me, spaced at regular intervals, were finely decorated circular apertures through which light gained entry and reflected off the polished wood, reinforcing the serious mood of the library. running down the center of the corridor was a long row of reading tables, each with a green-shaded brass lamp. The library appeared endless; in both directions the corridor banished into darkness with no definable end. But this wasn’t important. Describing the library would be like going to see a Turner and commenting on the frame. On all of the walls, end after end, shelf after shelf, were books. Hundreds, thousands, millions of books. Hardbacks, paperbacks, leather-bound, uncorrected proofs, handwritten manuscripts, everything. I stepped closed and rested my fingertips lightly against the pristine volumes. They felt warm to the touch, so I leaned closer and pressed my ear to the spines. I could hear a distant hum, the rumble of machinery, people talking, traffic, seagulls, laughter, waves on rocks, wind in the winter branches of trees, disant thunder, heavy rain, children playing, a blacksmith’s hammer–a million sounds all happening together. And then, in a revelatory moment, the clouds slid back from my mind and a crystal-clear understanding of the very nature of books shone upon me. They weren’t just collections of words arranged neatly on a page to give the impression of reality–each of these volumes was reality. The similarity of these books to the copies I had read back home was no more than the similarity a photograph has to its subject. These books were alive!

–Thursday Next, Lost in a Good Book

The Chess Set in the Mirror

When a little book called “The Chess Set in the Mirror” came into my hands, I was thinking about chess, not mirrors.The story will sound a little familiar. A small boy who has been misbehaving is locked in a room by his parents, and warned not to touch the mirror! The door is closed (presumably locked) and the boy, naturally, can’t keep away from the mirror, which is sitting up high on a mantle. The only other things in the room, oddly, are a chess set upon a small table, in the middle of the room, and hence reflected in the mirror. The boy is not, because he is too short to see himself.

For several moments he devotes his energies towards trying to see his own reflection, and it is no surprise that after awhile he finds that he has ended up in the mirror, on the other side.The White King, we are given to understand, is the culprit responsible for this sudden change in existence.

As fantasia goes (the author, both the back of the book and Wikipedia assures, was the first to coin the term “magical realism”) it is more allegorical than most—more so even than Alice and her Looking Glass adventures. And the narrator—who, let us remember, was the kind of child a parent felt obligated to lock away in a room—is more than usually judgemental about the place he finds himself, and the people he meets there.

But the book is eerie and haunting (and as such doesn’t feel much like a children’s story).  I wrote a more complete review here

the future of the book?

Have you ever run your hands along the spines of the books on a shelf and wished that just by touching them, you could absorb everything in them? This has been a common fantasy of mine since I first realized I would never be able to read all the books in the world–in other words, since about the age of five. I don’t think I’d ever bargain away anything important for money or fame, but I might well sign a Faustian agreement for the sake of a glove like the one in Delany’s Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand:

She made a gesture with her chin over her shoulder. “Back there I’ve got a carton of catalog cubes from the Inter-Sector Broadcast Library.” She laid two fingers on his gloved hand. “Thanks to that, you’re tuned into the compressed textual band. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

She snorted. “What are the four largest geosectors on this world?”

“Abned, Rhyon, Cogonak.” He paused to question why she wanted to know. “And Emenog. . .?”

“. . .You see, in terms of data at hand, right now you’re on a par with the Skahadi Library itself–,” which, when her tongue lifted for the initial sibilant, he had never heard of before, but which, by the time it fell from the final vowel, he knew had been founded in ‘12 in Lower Cogonak, back when it had still been officially a part of Abned, before the Severence Decision of ‘80–which was when the Yellows had won their first major electoral victory. “You’re in touch,” she explained, “at this point, with a good deal more information than I am. . .Anyway, I figured we’d put all that to some use. Like I said, the carton’s filled with catalog cubes–about five hundred of them. They’re not there at random: they’re all texts I’ve wanted to read but never got around to. There’re more than a few in it I’ve discussed in great detail with various people, just as though I had read them. There’re a whole lot that I’ve read the first chapters of and have meant to read the rest for years. And there’re lots I read when I was much too young and have been intending to reread. Oh yes, and there’re about ten or fifteen I’ve read and reread a lot and just like a lot. Anyway. The instructions of the box your glove came in say that I–ordinary mortal that I am–can only absorb texts from the broadcast band at about one every ten minutes. But, as you may have figured out by now, I’m a lazy bitch. It says that if you’ve been through Radical Anxiety Termination, you can absorb them about one every point-thirty-two seconds; that’s without turning your mind into wet sand. You see, what I want to do is talk to somebody who’s read everything I should have read. I want to control such a man, make him lie down in the sand and lick my toes.” She grinned in the dark. “The glove will give you the texts verbatim. On hot, hazy nights, I’ll let you recite choice passages to me so that I can pick and choose. I can always get them myself with the glove later. But I think this way is more useful, more interesting.” She pushed another pedal. “Don’t you?”

–Samuel Delany, Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand

In Hovering Flight

Because it has been so hot here, I’ve been taking my dog for his walk in the evening, at dusk, rather than in the afternoon has we had been wont to do over the winter and spring. And although having a bouncing, energetic retriever pulling you along isn’t really the quietest way to travel, I have noticed the silence of dusk, and I have noticed the birds—the herons flying inland from the sound, the bluebirds and swallows, winging their way to their nests. The dog has flushed out doves, brown thrashers and an endless number of cardinals.

Perhaps the birds were always here and I just wasn’t looking, but in the evenings they are more easily noticed, as the background noise of human activity dies away. Most of the houses are lit with the flickering, uncertain light of televisions as we walk by—the dog, with his nose to the ground seeing nothing, and I, with my eyes peering into the trees, feeling as though I were seeing everything for the first time.

Sometimes life seems oddly serendipitous. It wasn’t long after Ray (the dog) and I started our evening walks that I was given a copy of Joyce Hinnefeld’s debut novel, In Hovering Flight. It is the kind of book designed to appeal to me—about poetry and painting and birds and artists. But I long ago decided that subject was not as important to me as style—interesting tidbits of information no longer excuses uncertain and mediocre writing. So while I was interested in learning, for example, the proper way to write in a field notebook if you are a bird watcher, or that John James Audubon may have invented the Cuvier’s Kinglet he describes in one of his many journals, it would not have been enough to capture my attention—even with the mention of Audubon, a person I am interested in for many reasons, one of which is actually hanging on the wall behind my head. The style of the section called “field notebooks” however? Oh, that captured my attention immediately. It was quite as beautiful as the walks I took with my dog. Reading it makes me feel just like as if I’m standing on the small sandy rise down the street(soon to be a housing development but it was once a Civil War bunker, so it is a place that knows about battles) —looking down towards the sound, enjoying the wind and resisting the tugging of the dog and just watching the sky for flying creatures:

“Scarlet loved even the great blue herons, which became increasingly common in that protected area nea the Delaware as she grew into her teens, their harsh, ugly screeches piercing their mornings and evenings on the screened porch where they ate their meals. She would never forget the sight of one rising from the creek each morning, the spring when she was twelve, as she let the screen door slam behind her on her way to catch the bus to school. That rush of wins and then the silent, massive span above her head, darkening the sky—every time, it made her catch her breath. And she tried to find a way to describe its rising each day on the bus, playing with words in her head: “giant, silent feathered airplane,” blue-gray cloud with wings.” Tom, to her ongoing embarrassment, kept her spiral-bound notebooks from those years—notebooks full of phrases like these but rather lacking in homework assignments.

“Herons make you reach for words, she told her father…”

In Hovering Flight is a novel about mothers and daughters, poets and painters, and passion—the kind of passion that in an earlier era would have been named a “calling.” Addie is an artist and poet who paints birds. Ted is her biologist husband who thinks teaches science using poetry. Scarlet is their daughter, named for the one bird her mother never managed to capture on canvas. (If she had been a boy, she would have been named Tanager).

Theodore’s study

A library should reflect the personality of its owner. Theodore’s study–one of the few bookish scenes in the whole of Gerald Durrell’s ouevre, reflects the eccentricities of its owner perfectly.

During the last days of the dying summer, and throughout the warm, wet winter that followed, tea with Theodore became a weekly affair. Every Thursday I would set out, my pockets bulging with match-boxes and test-tubes full of specimens, to be driven into the town by Spiro. It was an appointment that I would not have missed for anything.

Theodore would welcome me in his study, a room that met with my full approval. It was, in my opinion, just what a room should be. The walls were lined with tall bookshelves filled with volumes on freshwater biology, botany, astronomy, medicine, folklore and similar fascinating and sensible subjects. Interspersed with these were selections of ghost and crime stories. Thus Sherlock Holmes rubbed shoulders with Darwin, and Le Fanu with Fabre, in what I considered to be a thoroughly well-balanced library.  At one window of the room stood Theodore’s telescope, its nose to the sky like a howling dog, while the sills of every window bore a parade of jars and bottles containing minute freshwater fauna, whirling and twitching among the delicate fronds of green weed. On one side of the room was a massive desk, piled high with scrapbooks, micro-photographs, X-ray plates, diaries, and notebooks. On the opposite side of the room was the microscope table, with its powerful lamp on the jointed stem leaning like a lily over the flat boxes that housed Theodore’s collection of slides. The microscopes themselves, gleaming like magpies, were housed under a series of beehive-like domes of glass.

–Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

the magician’s study

This was my favorite of the Narnia series, and the Dufflepuds possibly my favorite creatures in the book:

It was a large room with three big windows and it was lined from floor to ceiling with books; more books than Lucy had ever seen before, tiny little books, fat dumpy books, and books bigger than any church Bible you have seen, all bound in leather and smelling old and learned and magical. But she knew from her instructions that she need not bother about any of these. For the Book, the Magic Book, was laying on a reading desk in the very middle of the room. She saw she would have to read it standing (and anyway there were no chairs) and also that she would have to stand with her back to the door while she read it. So at once she turned to shut the door.

It wouldn’t shut.

-C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

tricks in the library

Harriet Vane thinks of libraries as places of refuge. But her refuge at her alma mater is under attack:

The New Library was a handsome, lofty room, with six bays on the South side, lit by as many windows running nearly from the floor to the ceiling. On the North side, the wall was windowless, and shelved to a height of ten feet. Above this was a space of blank wall, along which it would be possible, at some future time, to run an extra gallery when the books should become too many for the existent shelving. This blank space had been adorned by Miss Burrows and her party with a series of engravings, such as every academic community possesses, representing the Parthenon, the Colosseum, Trajan’s Column and other topographical and classical subjects.

All the books in the room had been dragged out and flung on the floor, by the simple experient of removing the shelves bodily. The pictures had been thrown down. And the blank wall-space thus exposed had been adorned with a frieze of drawings, roughly executed in brown paint, and with inscriptions in letters a foot high all of the most unseemly sort. A pair of library steps and a pot of paint with a wide brush in it stood triumphantly in the midst of the wreckage, to show how the transformation had been accomplished.

“That’s torn it,” said Harriet.

- Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night

the labyrinth

Every library should have a secret room that guards a long-lost text. I hate what the movie did to Umberto Eco’s creation, because its labyrinthine nature was much more beautifully demonstrated by the Latin quotes that graced every arched doorway. To navigate by means of endless amounts of string may have been easier to show, but was rather anticlimactic:

The room, as I said, had seven walls, but only four of them had an opening, a passage flanked by two little columns set in the wall; the opening was fairly wide, surmounted by a round-headed arch. Against the blind walls stood huge cases, laden with books neatly arranged. Each case bore a scroll with a number, and so did each individual shelf; obviously the same numbers we had seen in the catalogue. In the midst of the room was a table, also covered with books. On all the volumes lay a fairly light coat of dust, sign that the books were cleaned with some frequency. Nor was their dirt of any kind on the floor. Above one of the archways, a big scroll, painted on the wall, bore the words “Apocalypsis Iesu Christi.” It did not seem faded, even thought the lettering was ancient. We noticed afterward, also in the other rooms, that these scrolls were actually carved in the stone, cut fairly deeply, and the depressions had subsequently been filled with color, as painters do in frescoing churches.

-Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

the library of quinta da soledade

A book about a lost manuscript and fanatical book dealers is bound to have plenty of library scenes. The best is in the nearly emptied, dilapidated house of Victor Fargas - Quinta da Soledade (The House of Solitude):

Corso nodded vaguely, but Fargas didn’t notice. at one end of the vast room was an enormous fireplace with logs piles up in it. There were a pair of unmatched armchairs, a table and sideboard, an oil lamp, two big candlesticks, a violin in its case, and little else. But on the floor, lined up nearly on old, faded, threadbare rugs, as far away as possible from the windows and the leaden light coming through them, lay a great many books; five hundred or more, Corso estimated, maybe even a thousand. Many codices and incunabula among them. Wonderful old books bound in leather or parchment. Ancient tomes with studs in the covers, folios, Elzevirs, their bindings decorated with goffering, bosses, rosettes, locks, their spines and front edges covers with gilding and calligraphy done by medieval monks in the scriptoria of their monasteries. He also noticed a dozen or so rusty mousetraps in various corners.

-Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Club Dumas

I’ve worked with books most of my life, but not as a collector. I had to look up a couple of terms in the description above. “Elsevirs” are books published by a famous family of Dutch booksellers. “Goffering” is a decoration of ridges or pleats produced by a hot iron.

the restricted section

I actually think JK Rowling was rather brilliant in NOT making books very central to her series. (The book signing scene in Flourish & Blott’s in Chamber of Secrets is hilariously spot-on!). But the library in Hogwarts is a thing of beauty:

The Restricted Section was right at the back of the library. Stepping carefully over the rope that separated these books from the rest of the library, he held up his lamp to read the titles.

They didn’t tell him much. Their peeling, faded gold letters spelled words in languages Harry couldn’t understand. Some had no title at all. One book had a dark stain on it that looked horribly like blood. The hairs on the back of Harry’s neck prickled. Maybe he was imaging it, maybe not, but he thought a faint whispering was coming from the books, as though they knew someone was there who shouldn’t be.

He had to start somewhere. Setting the lamp down carefully on the floor, he looked along the bottom shelf for an interesting-looking book. A large black and silver volume caught his eye. He pulled it out with difficulty, because it was very heavy, and, balancing it on his knee, let it fall open.

A piercing, bloodcurdling shriek split the silence - the book was screaming!

-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone