books and paper

Though frequently derided as holdovers from and the detritus of previous centuries, hardbound books and writing paper are poised to make a comeback.

The computer is a wonderful tool, but it has a tendency to dominate and tyrannize users' lives, like a drug habit, if it is not closely controlled. This is especially true when the machine enters and fills a life which is otherwise a vacuum.

New York Times columnist Verlyn Klinkenborg addressed this topic yesterday with his typically few choice words.

"I love the typefaces and the bindings and the feel of well-made paper," he says. "But what I really love is their inertness. No matter how I shake “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” mushrooms don’t tumble out of the upper margin, unlike the “Alice” for the iPad. I never have the lingering sense that there is another window open behind page 133 of “the lives and times of archy and mehitabel."

And he concludes that "The truth is that I need that help to keep reading, especially as much as I always have. The question isn’t what will books become in a world of electronic reading. The question is what will become of the readers we’ve been — quiet, thoughtful, patient, abstracted — in a world where interactive can be too tempting to ignore."

I have any number of hardbound volumes I haven't read, and quite a few that are calling me to read them again. Like Mr. Klinkenborg, I love the look and feel of high-quality paper, especially if it's the long-lived kind, made with rags, that's kept it's integrity for over 100 years. For example, the pages in my five-voume set of "The Library of Wit and Humor," published by Gebbey and Company in Philadelphia in the 1880's, are still white, as are the pages of a History of England by David Hume I once handled and looked over, published in the mid-eighteenth century.

Also, I love the look and feel of inscribing black letters on white pages by hand, with liquid ink, and plan to return to maintaining a primitive "blog, "i.e., keeping a real, handwritten diary one day, if it's in the cards for me to ever get my handwriting under control again.

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