A little nostalgia--very little

I buy a lot of books second hand, on the Internet or at yard sales or library sales. I don’t worry about the condition as long as all the pages are there. I was about to add “and as long as they are clean,” but that’s not entirely true.

Recently I was riveted by the entries in The Best American Crime Reporting 2007, edited by Linda Fairstein. After the first entry, by Tom Junod, about the deaths in nursing homes and hospitals after flooding from Hurricane Katrina, I told everyone about the injustice being done to the only two people indicted in the deaths of the elderly or disabled during the flood. As I read on, my respect and admiration grew. That’s when I noted that the dirt on the front cover probably could be washed off. I applied a warm sponge, and washed the cover. I did this a couple of times.

I’m not a clean freak, but I do love books. Once upon a time writing and reading meant not only holding an object in your hands but also caring for it. We taped a small tear in a dust jacket, glued in pages that had fallen out from repeated use, washed covers of paperbacks or hard covers of dictionaries. Now we just read a forever perfect copy on the computer.

For those of a certain age, learning how to iron the pages of your manuscript so you could send it out repeatedly without retyping it was an important step in your career. If a mss was typed perfectly, without a single typo, misaligned page, or missing header, you wanted to keep it and use it as many times as possible. Ironing pages was a necessary skill.

I once received in the mail the return of a mss I was confident would be accepted for publication. All the pages curled up in the lower right-hand corner, a sure sign that several people had read it. But the thumb prints left on the paper meant I couldn’t reuse the front page. No amount of ironing could save the mss unless I could erase the prints.

Yes, those days are gone, and I’m just as glad as anyone else. But I wonder if we have lost something in not having to exercise special care with a book or manuscript.

A Moment of Bliss

This will probably be one of the oddest blogs I’ve ever written, but I have decided to post it anyway because the thought behind it will not go away.

About a month ago I borrowed from the library a book of essays recommended by a fellow writer. I don’t normally read Zadie Smith’s fiction, but my friend assured me I would enjoy her nonfiction, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, published by Penguin in 2009. The book arrived by mail from a lending library I belong to, and when I opened it up I at first thought this was just another book. I opened the book at random and had a moment of exhilaration and bliss. There, on the page, beneath my fingers, sat a five-line footnote.

Perhaps you are thinking this is silly, or pretentious, or a waste of time. Perhaps it is. But for me, it was a surprise because I hardly thought I cared about nonfiction anymore beyond the occasional interesting book of pop culture. I enjoy Malcolm Gladwell’s take on things, but he’s not a scientist or anyone whose opinion I would accept over my own, not without a lot more research. But the discovery of the footnote in Smith’s book brought me back to something I do care about.

The collection of essays is thoughtful and wide ranging, and it shows in the construction of the book, something I had missed without realizing it. This book opened the door to a room I had closed off years ago when I finished graduate school and left teaching (my teaching career was nothing to be excited about). The book has all the working parts of a carefully constructed work: Dedication, Epigram, Table of Contents, Foreword, seventeen essays distributed by theme in five parts, with footnotes as necessary, Acknowledgments (yes, at the back of the book), and an index. Do you have any idea how rare an index is these days?

A book with footnotes, index, along with the work is a body to be enjoyed on many levels. The footnotes answer those moments of curiosity that can’t be explored well in the main text but yet call out to be considered, or provide additional information that enhances our understanding of the main point, or tells us the author has a sense of humor, a personality sometimes more playful or thoughtful or something not fully in accord with the tone of the main text.

At this point I might have concluded that the discovery of a well-put-together book was enough joy for one day, and left the book on the table to be read at a later date. But I delved in at once, reading the first essay. (I am methodical, and almost put that aside in a footnote, but here it is, casually dropped in.)

The first essay rewarded me with another pleasure—the discussion of a word, in this case soulful, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Smith discusses her first encounter with this book, and growing into over the years. Her experience reflects several I had at that age, fourteen, when my mother offered books for me to read and I would have nothing to do with them. I had my own choices at that age.

I haven’t finished the collection yet, and when I spoke with the librarian she said, “Don’t feel you have to get to it in a hurry. This is an eight-week book.” Another moment of bliss at all that generosity. That sounds like a long time, and to merely read pages, perhaps it is. But to enjoy every aspect of this book I know I’ll want more time. I plan to renew.