The lens of a book
Yesterday I received a book as a gift.
It measured 8 1/2 by 6 1/2 inches, and contained 256 printed pages (including index), with another five in introduction and eight more in bookplate, title, copyright, dedication, contents, and trailer pages, in all about an inch and a half of paper between the hard covers. The covers themselves were a silvery-gray matte, embossed with a marble texture that allowed patches of sheen to show through washes of barely-felted cloth; the slipcover provided decoration: a smiling Brother Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Latourrette seated before the gate inside his garden, holding a hand-turned wooden bowl of ripe peaches, surrounded by his season’s harvest. Sweet peppers and mallows and basil and greens, dark beets and eggplant, mid-season red potatoes and green beans and the ripest red tomatoes.
A woman named Kim Grant took the photo - perhaps she was a friend, or a visitor to Brother Victor-Antoine’s monastery; Deborah Kerner designed the jacket using that photograph. In the dedication, the author thanks his editor, Pam Hoenig, who spent many hours working with the manuscript and shepherding it through the process from pen to print. She probably received the pages digitally on disk or over the wire, and assigned it to associate editors for proofing and first reads. She may have read the entire work herself, offering suggestions from her “second set of eyes” and her knowledge of the market, rearranging or even shaping the vision of the book. There would no longer have been an original set of “galleys” to proof and refine; rather, the text would have been arranged on the screen, sorted into pages, maybe even adorned before heading off to one or more proof readers. The proofers would have worked in the comfort of their homes, perhaps surrounded by their own manuscripts and libraries, and would have marked up and sent their corrections back to Pam, who would approve the changes and apply them.
Ms. Hoenig’s company, The Harvard Common Press, chose the work for publishing. Another handful of Printers received the finished work and created physical pages, bound the book, wrapped the dust cover, boxed them, and handed off cases of the volume to a small army of drivers or pilots, whose part of the story is short and unpoetic, but nevertheless essential. Hands receiving the boxes, wheels and wings delivering them, hands transferring from truck to trolly to warehouse or store, a signature, a polite word of thanks, a departure. Then the books are lined up on a shelf, or a table, or a web page, and in one of these venues meets the gaze of someone who wants to learn…
A book, in its being, contains the energy and intention of a small village of people, scattered round the country or round the globe. Each hand touches it, from mind to pen (computer key), pen to page, page to eye to mind to heart and back again, then manifest on what was living wood. Paper that catches and contains warmth, has a finish, a measured roughness, a rasp and whisper to open and to turn a page, a slight indentation when letter-pressed, a gentle gradient of light into shadow, growing dark when the day ends and the sun leaves the sky, red-lit when a bedside candle offers a few more minutes to an eager mind. The cover wears but protects its contents. Paper is chosen without acids so as not to weather or fade. A book requires no electricity. It occupies space, like a person. It ends in fire or decay, like a life.
A book, in its sense, is a container shaped by author and editor. It is a little lens held up before the horizon, that lights upon and magnifies some small or large collection of shapes, drawing out in rustic or magnificent strokes one vision of this world in which we live. It is a human-sized order created from Order. It is an artist assembling a framed image from the colors on his or her palette, and presenting it, that it instruct and delight (or at least delight, and possibly instruct); or it is a fellow traveller telling the story of what has been seen, through these eyes, in this way, with this understanding: take it as you will. There is value in a frame, for author and reader both.
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With the attention and investment of so many lives, there is something enduring and essential to a printed book, which cannot be present in the same work delivered digitally. At 10pm last night, I began reading a childhood favorite by C.S. Lewis, got caught up in the memory of my mother’s voice, in an echo of my childhood thoughts, and took the book with me to read in bed. The writing was finished in 1956, before I was born. The literary tradition back through Shakespeare to Chaucer to monasteries like that of our Brother Victor-Antoine were contained in that printed text.
While “posts” such as this – with no editor but my own inner whim, no proof-reader but my impatience, and no container but my own wandering interests – live for a moment (if that) among a million-million other moments on the screen of a computer. When the power fails (and it does, and it will), these words written without review, and without similar investment of a community of publishers, will blink out and be gone. This small thought, given ethereal life, on a backlit keyboard at dusk on a Christmas Day, is simply a daybook entry “posted” (as though sent by post) to this jittery life of electrons, that through some magic of human invention is held stable in space, as fragile as spider’s silk in the wind.
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The sun sets behind the corn field and its ring of trees. Next year, the field will be here. Next year, the trees will be one ring older, in their hundred-year cycles of life. Next year, Brother Victor-Antoine’s book will stand among others on my shelf. But these words, like dust in the wind…