Is it possible to write books without loving books?
I know, these are two entirely separate questions.
Most people would agree (I believe) that reading widely helps a writer learn the craft of writing. The better read you are, the better able you are to write well.
And how you write is influenced by what you read. Over your lifetime and in the moment. I can remember spending a summer, for example, reading everything James Joyce ever wrote in anticipation of a course I was taking that fall at University. I was immersed in Joyce for four full months (if you've ever tried to read Finnegan's Wake, you'll understand how it took me four months!) and my own writing from that summer shows clear signs of the Irish master, in its structure, its characters, its language and rhythm.
Joyce's influence, of course, has faded over time but he is still there when I write. More subtly, less directly. But there.
The second question cannot be so clearly answered. In fact, I would think that a great many writers probably don't really like books in and of themselves. They like their own books, to be sure, and they probably have favourite authors whose works line their shelves. They may even have a much-loved autographed first edition of a particularly influential book in their possession.
But do they love books as physical entities?
I do and that's why I was so particularly struck by this passage from The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, Allison Hoover Bartlett's 2009 docudrama about a book thief:
Walking by a booth with an impressive selection of dust jacket art [at a rare book fair], I heard a dealer say to a passerby, "Don't judge a book by its content!" I had read enough about book collectors before the fair to get the joke: Many collectors don't actually read their books. At first, I was surprised, but having given it some thought, it's not so shocking. After all, much of the fondness avid readers, and certainly collectors, have for their books is related to the books' physical bodies. As much as they are vessels for stories (and poetry, reference information, etc.), books are historical artifacts and repositories for memories...
I love the feeling of a book in my hand. I love to think about the history of the particular volume as I hold it, thinking about who its former owners might have been, when and where they acquired it, when and where they read it, what they thought about it, how it affected their lives.
I picked up a collection of poems by Milton several years ago at a "boot sale" in England. I paid the equivalent of about $10 for this small, leather-bound volume that was printed in 1674. Imagine that. This book was printed 340 years ago, at the time of Charles II in England. It is older than Canada, than the U.S., then any person alive.
Imagine all the people who have owned this book, who have read it, who have cherished it, who have carried it around with them as they lived out their lives 100, 200 even 300 years ago!
And if that doesn't grab you, think about this little story.
In 2005, I found out that the young daughter of a friend of mine had gotten heavily into the Nancy Drew mysteries. I already knew this girl to be a talented young writer and something of a bibliophile so it didn't surprise me that she loved the Nancy Drew books but only in their earlier hard-cover editions. She didn't want the new, modern paperback books. She wanted the originals or at least the older versions.
Now, my entire family grew up reading the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew stories and my first memory of owning books involves these old blue- and yellow-covered volumes in the 1960s and early 1970s.
So I decided to go to a local used book store to buy as many of the old hard-cover Nancy Drews as I could find as a gift for this young girl's birthday.
I bought, I think, five and was as delighted to give them to her as she was to receive them.
Imagine my surprise when she came up to me shortly after the gift-giving moment, a delighted grin on her face. Without saying a word, she pushed one of the Nancy Drew books into my hands and opened up the front cover.
There, at the top of the first inside page, the one with the wall-paper print of scenes from Nancy Drew stories, was a name of a previous owner. My sister.
Somehow that book had made its way from my sister, back in the 1960s, through perhaps dozens of owners, to this girl, the daughter of my close friends.
I wish I could find a way to trace the 40-year route it took from my sister's hands to this girl's hands, just to see the way a book can flow through our community.
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