The Secret Life of Books
by Tom Mole
(London: Elliot and Thompson, 2019)
His books were also doing things to him. As well as pushing him out of his own office, they were shaping the spaces and the ways in which he worked.
Page 3.
All scholarship depends to some extent on other scholarship - even when it reaches different conclusions - and so the thousands of books he kept to hand assisted his work.
Page 3.
It was hard to convince him to downsize his library. His professional life, indeed his understanding of himself, was ranged around the shelves for all to see. Giving p some of his books felt like giving up part of his mind. There were benefits and difficulties in having such a large collection of books. But, for better or worse, his books were not just his passive tools; they were also exerting forces of their own on his life.
Page 4.
We think of books as tools for reading, but there’s more to them than that.
Page 4.
Our books are leading a double life. As well as being containers of words, they are things imbued with their own significance. Their importance - as my professor understood - goes far beyond the words or images they contain.
Page 4.
Books are part of how we understand ourselves.
Page 5.
Books become meaningful objects in all sorts of ways: treasured possessions, talismans, bearers of significance.
Page 5.
As the epoch of print ends, printed books are not simply vanishing; instead, their significance is being transformed.
Page 6.
The strange tenacity of the paper book will seem puzzling. But once we understand the life of books as objects, and the many functions they serve in our lives, then we’ll be better equipped to understand what’s happening to them now.
Page 6.
Learning to read means learning to stop looking at the book in front of us and to start looking through it.
Page 7.
As we gain the ability to lose ourselves in a book, the book as an object begins to get lost.
Page 8.
The words in the book are to its material form as the immortal soul is to the mortal body.
Page 8.
As objects, books are constantly sending us messages about how we should approach the texts they contain.
Page 9.
When you read a book, you’re always reading a material object as well as a string of text. Reading matter always takes the form of, well, matter.
Page 10.
We use books for a lot of things besides reading. They serve as badges of allegiance, identifying the bearer as part of a group of readers who are devoted to a particular kind of book. They can be insignia of class, indicating the social position of their owners in complex ways. They can become the focus of rituals and celebrations.
Page 10.
The meanings of things take shape in relation to the meanings of other things.
Page 11.
Shelves of antiquarian volumes in leather bindings signify one thing, a stack of second-hand paperbacks on a bedside table another. And the same volume can take on different connotations when used in different settings, at different times and in different ways.
Page 12.
We haven’t grasped the meanings of books if we think of them only as things to read.
Page 13.
Printing developed along slightly different lines in East Asia. Because the printers were working with written languages consisting of thousands of characters, rather than the limited Western alphabet, they tended to prefer wooden type (xylography), which was cheaper to produce and easier to alter.
Page 15.
The codex form emerged long before print, in the first centuries of the Common Era. It consists of a series of leaves staked on top of one another and gathered together along one edge. In other words, it’s the book as we know it now.
Page 16.
Christians were early adopters of the codex. They helped to refine the techniques required to make codices.
Pages 16-17.
As Christianity became more widespread, so the Christians’ preferred form of the book also took off.
Page 17.
Printing wasn’t used just for books. From the beginning a range of other things were printed, including forms, receipts, broadsides and poster.
Page 18.
The book as we know it today is the product of marriage between the form of the codex and the technology of print.
Page 18.
Digital technologies are challenging the role of print as our default medium for text. Meanwhile, new media are changing the habits of attention that the printed book fostered.
Page 19.
Reports of the death of the book are probably not just premature but also simplistic and overstated. But that doesn’t mean we should underestimate the challenge of the digital.
Page 19.
The printed codex has been so successful in part because it’s flexible enough to be used for a variety of different kinds of book.
Page 20.
When books stop serving us as tools or interfaces, they also start to come into view as things.
Page 30.
Like clothes or shoes that start off as identical copies and mould to their owners’ bodies over time, books get worn in once I started to pay attention to books as objects, I began to see traces of how those objects had been used
Page 31.
Books don’t reveal how they’ve been used only by their current owners; they sometimes carry scars form past encounters as well.
Page 31.
Different people handle their books in different ways, and so leave different kinds of traces.
Page 32.
Reading isn’t the only thing we do with books, or the only thing that leaves traces on them.
Page 34.
Books aren’t just personal possessions; they are also focal points for a number of social rituals. Holy books are the most obvious example.
Page 36.
The US House of Representatives allows newly elected members to choose the book used to swear them in. it doesn’t have to be a religious text. But there has to be a book: you can’t be sworn in without one. The power of the book to signify the seriousness of the oath is more important than the contents of the book chosen.
Page 38.
There’s a long history of authors inscribing copies of their books for friends. But the modern book signing, where authors sign books for a que of fans, is a recent invention.
Page 38.
When you pick up a novel in a library - or a poem or play - you’re not holding in your hand something that its creator actually touched. Where a painting is made from paint and canvas, a work of literature is made form words, which don’t have a material existence of their own in the way that paint does.
Page 39.
The author’s signature acts as a kind of guarantee that this book is his or her work. It’s not that we doubt that the author wrote the words. But, when the author signs the title page, the signature, like the signature on a painting, shows that this individual claims this object as their own production.
Page 40.
Having a book inscribed to you - even if it’s by an author that you’ve encountered only for a few minutes at a book-signing event - offers the comforting sense that this particular book is unlike any other copy of the same title. The book may be a mass-produced commodity, but the inscription allows you to imagine that this particular dopy has been destined for you alone.
Page 41.
Signing the book is a way of adding value to it as an object.
Page 41.
I soon began to notice how many other objects we use alongside books. Books sit at t he entre of a constellation of other objects, which orbit around the book like planets around the sun.
Pages 41-42.
Thinking about the book as an object opens the door to a wiser material culture of bookishness.
Page 42.
The way that I use books is accompanied and supported by the ways in which I use other objects.
Page 42.
The objects that get drawn into the book’s orbit help reveal how people use books and make then part of their lives.
Page 44.
Although modern librarians frown on this kind of thing, scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often read with scissors or knives in hand, cutting up both manuscript an printed sources into scraps or slips and filing these slips according to categories in elaborate systems. Readers of all kinds used pens and ink to write in their books. Before the invention of the modern pencil and the ballpoint pen, this was a much more involved practice than it is today, requiring a bottle of ink to dip your quill in and a penknife to ‘mend’ the nib.
Page 45.
Eighteenth-century gentlemen furnishing their libraries needed not only bookcases but also specially designed library chairs, tables and ladders. Lecterns made books available for reading aloud in public.
Page 46.
Once I started to pay attention to books as things, I realised that you couldn’t talk about the book as an object without also talking about the different things that people did with books.
Page 48.
Reading was only one of the things that people did with books, and not always the most important.
Page 48.
People used books alongside other objects, so they couldn’t be understood in isolation from the rest of the material culture of bookishness.
Page 48.
We know that Christians were early adopters of the codex format, but the historical Jerome, who lived from 347 to 420 CE, finishing his translation in 384, probably worked with scrolls as much as with codices.
Page 51.
Even divinely inspired texts have to circulate in books that are physical objects, subject to wear and tear, and prone to decay.
Page 52.
You can tell a lot about people by the books they put on their shelves.
Page 55.
It took a long time for bookshelves to take on their current for. Medieval readers kept their books in chests or displayed them on lecterns. Books were expensive luxuries so they tended to be either kept securely locked away or exhibited ostentatiously.
Page 56.
Some books had ‘bosses’ on the covers - little nodules of bone or nuggets of metal that served as feet when the book was lying flat, protecting the binding from shelf damage and allowing air to circulate around the book.
Pages 56-57.
The modern bookshelf is a product of bibliographical abundance. We need bookshelves because books are now readily available and relatively affordable.
Page 57.
Your books reveal who you are. To display them where other people can see them is to exhibit a particular version of your self.
Page 57.
Our books actually reveal more about us than our appearance, because they are visible markers of an inner life.
Page 58.
‘Bookishness’ - in the sense of buying, reading, keeping and displaying books - is partly a matter of temperament, as well as one of wealth or class.
Page 59.
Spending time with books, and spending money on books, is a choice that signals to others that you are a certain kind of person.
Page 59.
Selfhood is an ongoing project. If reading is, in part, an effort to shape who we will be in the future, then perhaps always wanting to read something new betrays some dissatisfaction with who we are now.
Page 60.
Teenagers of the future will have to find another way to distinguish themselves when no one carries a fat paperback under their arm any more.
Page 61.
Sometimes it’s not enough to read and recall the words in a book: we need to remember how important the book is for us by keeping a treasured copy close at hand.
Page 63.
Our identities are shaped not only by the books we buy, store, read and carry around with us but also by the books we set aside in favour of other things.
Page 66.
From about the 1770s onwards, the total number of books in circulation started to increase exponentially, marking a growth in book production that has barely slowed down since, this was the beginning of the age of print saturation.
Page 67.
An inscription separates the book from the rest of the print run and individualises it.
Page 69.
Declaring the identity of the owner on the endpapers of the book is also a way of recognising the importance of books in shaping that identity.
Page 70.
Whether they are read or not, books have also provided a conventional backdrop for staging erudition and power. …. The books are there to signify that knowledge is their business.
Pages 70-71.
Reading them is only one of the things we do with books, and not always the most significant. For a book to signal something about you, you don’t necessarily need to have read it.
Page 75.
Remembering things and keeping track of things were some of the first uses for books and writing. Some of the earliest objects that we can recognise as books were created for this purpose.
Page 76.
The book is a kind of external memory device in the sense that we can return to it again and ‘hear’ in our heads the same words in the same order.
Page 78.
In the late nineteenth century, the French ophthalmologist Louis Emile Javal observed that when people read, their eyes don’t move smoothly from left to right and for top to bottom; they flick backwards as well as forwards moving jerkily several items a second in little jumps. … As we read we orient ourselves in relation to the architecture of the page.
Page 79.
Audio books and e-books don’t contain visual-spatial or tactile clues in the same way as paper books.
Page 82.
My bookshelves thus offer the comforting sensation that reading is cumulative: that when I’m reading, I’m not just spending time with book, but investing time in cultivating a more learned version of myself. As the bookshelves fill, so the reader’s knowledge and range of reference accumulates.
Page 83.
Books on the shelves are sandbags stacked against the floodwaters of forgetting.
Page 84.
The relationships books seem to enable are relationships between the reader and the characters, not between the reader and other people.
Page 86.
Books might interrupt or displace our relationships with other people but they compensate us for this by creating new imaginary relationships while we read.
Page 86.
Books bring us together and, sometimes, they keep us apart.
Page 87.
Many courting couples in the nineteenth century - as well as some today - read poems aloud to one another, making the book into a ligament of their relationship, a bond between them.
Page 93.
If books can bring us together, they can also keep us apart. Bring out a novel on the bus or in a café and it’s a clear sign that you don’t want other people to talk to you. Books can screen us off from other family members even when they’re in the same room, creating bubbles of privacy in shared domestic spaces.
Pages 98-99.
Among collectors of books, highly prized volumes an lead to bitter rivalries.
Page 99.
When books were out of reach financially, people of modest means could club together to buy one copy between them and pass it around.
Page 102.
For Franklin, book clubs weren’t just a convenient tool for social life or self-improvement; they were a model for how private citizens could come together to serve the public good, and an example of the kind of institutions that the new United States would need.
Page 104.
Where there are books, sooner or later there will be book clubs.
Page 107.
Men, it seems, don’t talk about books in quite the same way. If book clubs are mostly female spaces, this is partly because they privilege a way of talking that’s often imagined as women’s talk: non-competitive, non-confrontational, friendly, digressive and collaborative. The conversations book clubs thrive on are process-driven rather than end-directed: the aim isn’t to convince anyone to change their view, or even to reach a consensus, but simply a hear and value the range of perspective.
Pages 108-109.
Book clubs bring people together to share an experience that each of them had alone.
Pages 110.
The relationships that books sponsor start early and last long. And they don’t stop with death. Books connect us to the dead.
Page 111.
Books themselves are durable enough to outlive the generation that produced them, becoming time capsules containing souvenirs of past readings.
Page 111.
Dead people’s books offer a tangible link to a time when their owners were alive and reading, as well as a reminder that this time has passed.
Page 113.
When you’re along with a book, you’re never really alone.
Page 113.
Every book is a potential meeting place, an agora, or even a mausoleum.
Page 114.
To invest emotionally in a particular kind of book - to buy it, read it repeatedly, carry it around with you - s to signal your identity as a particular kind of person.
Page 118.
For some of us, at least, our relationship with books starts early, usually in the lap of a parent.
Page 119.
Many children ask for the same book night after night, developing an intimacy not only with the words of the story but also with the object of the book itself. Along with favourite toys, books are attachment objects.
Page 119.
Children’s books are often flamboyantly physical.
Page 120.
Children love books even before they an read them.
Page 122.
You have to be careful when giving books, though. If you choose a title that leaves the recipient cold, you risk revealing how little you understand their tastes.
Page 122.
Books mark out the milestones of people’s lives. Throughout the West, at least until the nineteenth century, people recorded the births, marriages and deaths of family members in the family Bible, a book that was often passed down from one generation to another.
Page 124.
Schools have often invested money in books, and then invested them with prestige, in a way that far exceeds their pedagogical use.
Page 125.
There’s a long tradition of asking books to answer questions, make prophecies or tell your fortune. The technical term for this is bibliomancy. … It has to be a work of wisdom or power, and preferably one already concerned with prophecy. And so there’s a curious slippage here, in which the insight and inspiration of the work contained in the book get transferred onto the book itself.
Pages 127-129.
The appearance of that thing - the published book - turns its writer into a different kind of person. … The appearance of a published book is a mark of validation that has a defining effect. Authors make books, but books also make authors.
Page 131.
The appearance of a book in print is a sign that it has passed beyond the author’s control.
Pages 131-132.
To publish a book is to imagine not only its circulation across space but also its endurance through time. Every act of writing and publishing is thus an attempt to ward off death, to sae something of ourselves from oblivion.
Page 133.
In the medieval period, when all books were written out by hand, it was not that odd for a book to be produced for a particular reader.
Page 135.
The relationships between people and books did not necessarily end with the death of the reader. The dead often went to their final rest clutching some reading matter.
Page 136.
I’ve always found something rather soothing about bookshops and libraries. The larger the better, as far as I’m concerned.
Page 139.
The library seems to encourage some kinds of reading, while making others more difficult to sustain.
Page 141.
Libraries and large bookshops can be paralysing, as well as empowering.
Page 141.
Books in large numbers provoke mixed feelings. They inspire a feeling of power - so much knowledge at our fingertips! - but they also produce anxieties about how little we actually know, and how much remains unread.
Page 143.
Books have a public life as well as a private one.
Page 144.
Books assembled together can reflect - and even form - the character of an individual, a group or a nation.
Page 144.
Having the right books in the first place is only half the battle - you have to make it possible for people to find the books you have.
Page 145.
The wonder of the open shelves is that they allow you to find things you didn’t know you were looking for.
Page 146.
The arrangement of a library of a bookshop is also a tacit argument about the organisation of knowledge. By putting some books together and shelving others far apart, it makes some intellectual connections easier to trace than others, some kinds of argument easier to construct.
Page 146.
Library classifications provide well-worn, natural-seeming channels in which our thoughts can flow, while actually making some kinds of thought harder to think.
Page 147.
Library classification systems give the impression that they reflect an accepted order of things, shelving things together that naturally belong together. But only a little reflection reveals that they are actually making implicit arguments about the world beyond the library.
Rather than reflecting the natural order of the world around us, the ways in which librarians and booksellers organise books help to produce our frames of reference for understanding the world.
Page 148.
Libraries are the material record of decisions made by someone to buy certain books and not others, to keep some books and sell or give away others, to organise books into a particular order and so on.
Page 153.
Walk into a library, and you find yourself in the middle of an argument about the shape of knowledge itself.
Page 153.
Like the Arc de Triomphe or the Eiffel Tower, the Bibliotheque nationale is an emblem of French self-confidence. But, while the first was built of stone and the second of steel, the third was built of books.
Page 157.
Books materialise the knowledge of the nation.
Page 157.
Book destruction - or biblioclasm, to give it is technical name - is sadly common through much of human history.
Page 159.
To destroy a people, it seems, you must first destroy its books. Bilbiocide and genocide go hand in hand.
Page 160.
Libraries’ willingness to buy, store and circulate books in many languages, and from many cultures, reflects a cosmopolitan openness to other people and their ideas. The battle against books is a battle against history, against learning, against culture, against openness to others.
Page 162.
Destroying books is a deliberate strategy for attacking the identity of a culture and denying its right to exist.
Page 162.
The Kindle wasn’t just a substitute for the paper book; it was also a bookselling platform … and it was a publishing platform too.
Page 172.
In order to gain the confidence of readers already familiar with manuscript books, the new medium of print had to adopt some features of the existing technology. Fast forward nearly 600 years and we can see the same thing happening with e-readers, as they borrow features from the familiar form of the printed book. The end of print - if that’s what this is - recalls its beginning.
Page 174.
Fifteenth-century printers … invested time and resources in printing books because books were luxury products with a lot of cachet. They wanted to borrow the cultural currency of the manuscript book to promote the new technology of print.
Page 176.
Books provided a way to pass the time on a train journey, while reassuring travellers that their time was being put to good use. In the process, books played an important part in making rail travel seem socially acceptable, and easing the anxieties that it generated. The old technology of the book and the new technology of the railway found themselves in symbiosis.
Page178.
Books and railways went together like horse and carriage. The new technology of rail travel became more familiar and acceptable through its connection with the old technology of print.
Page 179.
There’s not much point having a phone if you don’t know who to call, so the phone book was essential to popularizing the technology.
Page 180.
The phone book was essential to the phone’s success.
Page 181.
From their beginnings, audiobooks have raised questions about whether listening to books counts as ‘reading’ - questions that haven’t gone away as more and more people have begun using them.
Page 185.
When new technologies move into bookish space, their advocates often try to make two claims at once. On one hand, they claim the new technology will disappear … leaving only the familiar experience of the book: you’ll hardly notice the difference. On the other hand, they draw attention to the things it will do differently: you’ll be amazed at how much better it is.
Pages 186-187.
Books produced on paper or parchment are, for the most part, superbly durable.
Page 188.
Printed books work very well as technologies of the written word, but they cannot accommodate other media with ease.
Page 189.
Pick up an e-reader and you experience a drastically changed relationship between the material form of the book and the verbal content that it delivers.
Page 191.
A printed codex therefore embodies a one-to-one relationship between form and content.
Page 192.
Like all modern consumer electronics, e-readers have built-in obsolescence: they are designed to fail after a certain period of time, prompting us to buy a new, updated version.
Page 192.
While the e-book itself may be, at bottom, all zeros and ones, the experience of reading it is still physical.
Page 193.
Once you an access books electronically, why wouldn’t you access them on the device that you carry with you all the time. But the implications are actually rather momentous. For the first time in history, large numbers of people are reading long-form texts on devices - laptops, tablets and smartphones - that were not designed primarily for reading. The relationship between the book as a parcel of content and the book as a material thing is profoundly changed.
Pages 194-195.
People who have historically found it harder to get through the gates of traditional publishing have found the doors of the internet wide open. Digital text allows marginalised voiced a space of expression.
Page 195.
Much of this writing has a vanishingly small audience. Indeed, the very concept of a ‘mainstream’, a cohesive cultural centre, seems to be undermined by the proliferation of unfettered digital publishing. Online, it’s all tributaries and no river.
Page 196.
Electronic text is for ever unfinished, always subject to change, never set in stone.
Page 197.
While e-books and e-readers remove some of the inconveniences of paper books - for example by being much lighter and less bulky, and by allowing instant delivery of new books - they also make it harder to do some of the things that we commonly do with books, such as lending, borrowing, sharing, gifting and reselling.
Page 198.
When you purchase a printed book, you’re buying an object. It’s yours to do with more or less as you wish, and it remains our until you choose to dispose of it by selling it, giving it away or throwing it in the bin. But when you buy an e-book, what your actually buying is a licence to access the digital file.
Page 198.
There’s also some evidence that owning digital books just feels different form owning paper books. … This partly reflects a general tendency away from buying cultural products and towards subscribing to services that give us temporary access to them.
Pages 199-200.
Our experience of e-books is just somehow thinner than our experience of paper books - more weightless, not as satisfying, less substantial.
Page 200.
You can spend some time virtually browsing an online bookseller, but it’s a very different experience form hanging out in a bookshop where serendipitous discoveries lurk around every corner.
Page 200.
Because there’s no market for second-hand e-books and no incentive to develop one (quite the reverse) it’s unlikely that anyone will ever acquire an e-book that bears the traces of an unknown previous reader.
Page 201.
For the foreseeable future, we’re likely to see a mixed economy, in which print and electronic books coexist.
Page 203.
The most momentous aspect of our current moment of media change may be that our reading devices are now increasingly multifunctional. Giving us access to books is only one of the things we ask our tablets, smartphones and laptops to do.
Pages 203-204.
Distraction is now our default mental condition. The media environments we inhabit shape our habits of attention. It’s not that our attention spans are shrinking. By some measures they are getting longer: the average length of popular movies in 2000 was over ten minutes longer than in 1985. But the properties of our attention are changing.
Page 204.
Our reading habits are shaped by our reading objects. The individual absorbed in a printed book was to a large extent formed by the media ecology he or she inhabited.
Page 205.
Over time, unplugging from the matrix for long enough to read a novel will be less and less imaginable for more and more of us.
Page 206.
Picking up a paper book might start to seem like a tiny act of resistance - an effort to disconnect, however briefly, form the constant overstimulation of online life.
Page 206.
The proximity of death often produces declarations of love.
Page 207.
It doesn’t make sense to line up paper books and e-books simply as natural antagonists. Journalistic predictions about the death of the book are not just sensationalist and premature; they misunderstand how media change. New media don’t simply replace old media. Printed books did not replace manuscript books. In fact, the production of manuscript probably increased after the introduction of print.
Page 207.
The advent of photography didn’t kill off painting, although it did send it in new directions, as impressionism and then expressionism explored new artistic avenues. The CD, and then the MP3, didn’t spell the end of vinyl records, which are still produced in quite large numbers today. And so there are good reasons to think that e-books will not kill off printed books.
Page 208.
Printed books aren’t going away, but they are starting to take on new shades of meaning, and the choice to buy print instead of digital is gaining new kinds of significance.
Page 208.
To choose to buy a paper book, when there are other options on offer, is to value its thingness, to intentionally and voluntarily invest in the particular material form it takes, and consciously to prefer that form to others.
Page 209.
While some readers are happy for their books to migrate into digital environments, others are becoming more concerned with their existence as material things. They want their books to be beautiful as well as functional.
Page 209.
If paper books were simply machines for reading, delivery systems for streams of text, then we would happily have abandoned them by now in favour of faster, cheaper and more effective versions of the same thing, just as we’ve ditched telegrams in favour of emails. But there’s more to the book than that. It’s all the other things that we do with books besides reading them, all the meanings we infest them with, and all the imaginative work we ask them to do, that make it had to replace the printed book with another format, no matter how closely the new format replicates the reading experience of the existing one, or how much it promises to improve on it.
Page 210.
The book has penetrated deep into our conception of the universe, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Page 210.
Dante imagined the universe not as a scroll but as a codex.
Page 211.
The book, in its various forms, hasn’t just provided the delivery system for our most profound thoughts about the universe and our place in it; it has also sometimes supplied the language and imagery that shaped those thoughts and gave them voice.
Pages 211-212.
Dante’s own poem would have been copied out by scribes working in teams, so that each one saw only a portion of the poem.
Page 212.
The shift from the scroll in Isaiah’s day to the codex in Dante’s had provided a new way to understand the Creation.
Pages 212-213.
Changing the book means changing the world.
Page 213.
Packing up my books took a long time, not really because there were all that many books, but because there were so many pauses along the way as I reacquainted myself with books I hadn’t looked at for a while.
Page 217.
The unoccupied bookshelf offers a space of possibilities, an undiscovered country.
Page 222.
Even a private library is not entirely private. Books have a social life of their own. Each printed volume is one of many similar ones, which may number in the hundreds or in the millions. And so each volume is connected to other volumes, circulating through other hands, and each owner or reader is connected to the owners and readers of those volumes.
Pages 222-223.
To own a book (especially one that you could borrow from a library) is to insist on having a private relationship with it.
Page 223.
Some manuscript books were produced for a single owner, but printed books are always produced for a group of some kind.
Page 223.
As texts, my books bring news from the world: they are full of insights into the experience of people in other times and places. But as objects, they also link me to the world: they create material connections between me and other readers.
Page 223.
The book is a thing. While the particular material form that books take changes over time, the fact that they have a material form does not.
Page 224.
To encounter books is always to encounter a physical object that is burdened with meanings.
Page 224.