The Secret Life of Books: Why They Mean More Than Words

Uno dei migliori libri che abbia mai letto sui libri. Il libro non solo come oggetto ma come un essere vivente e forse anche di più ... Mi riservo di scrivere più a lungo su questa esperienza di lettura davvero unica ... Cinque stelle!

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Books, as Stephen King said, are a uniquely portable magic. Or, as Tom Mole puts it in The Secret Life of Books: Why They Mean More Than Words, with equal eloquence, ‘Books on the shelves are sandbags stacked against the floodwaters of forgetting.’ Mole’s new book – which is out next Thursday with Elliott & Thompson – is a paean to the book as thing, the object that is the book, the physical, tangible, visible, osmible (to coin a word) assemblage of paper and ink that is the codex or show more book.

George Gissing was one of many writers before Mole to note the importance of all of the paratextual qualities that make the book so much more than just a collection of marks on paper or vellum: ‘I know every book of mine by its smell,’ he once observed, ‘& I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.’ Mole is right that books can provide us with a window onto our own pasts, a secret passage to our memories. I still have all of the books I bought for my university degree, and I am always surprised by my students who don’t appear to own any of the books they’re studying, even the ones they like and have chosen to write about. (I suspect that Mole – or, more fully, Professor Tom Mole, Professor of English Literature and Book History at Edinburgh University – could tell similar tales about his own students’ non-book-buying habits.) And The Secret Life of Books: Why They Mean More Than Words is a ‘book about books’ in the most literal sense, concerned with the physical book out there in the world.

Over the course of eight entertaining chapters, Mole considers the book as book, the book as thing, the book as a marker of identity (the bookshelf being a way of revealing not only the book’s self but the self of its owner), the book and relationships, the book and life, the book in the world, the book and technology (cue discussion of the rise of the e-book and whether this poses a threat to the survival of the traditional paper book), and the future of the book. There follows a brief afterword or coda to Mole’s own codex, titled (but of course) ‘Book/End’.

One of the triumphs of this book is that what might come across as stating the obvious is saved from being so by Mole’s nice turns of phrase (as in the example I provided in the opening paragraph of this review) and the fund of irresistible anecdotes and examples he is able to draw upon. The travel writer and WWII hero Patrick Leigh Fermor liked to paste envelopes into the back covers of his books. He would fill these envelopes with letters from friends, newspaper clippings, and other papers which personalised the book as his book. According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great took a volume of Homer with him on his military campaigns. More recently, Ernest Shackleton took a Bible with him on his expedition to Antarctica – a Bible that had been presented to him by Queen Alexandra, widow of King Edward VII. Mole tells us that when Shackleton and his crew were forced to abandon their ship, he tore two pages out of the Bible and jettisoned the rest. One of the two pages he salvaged contained the inscription from the Queen. And it was good to learn that Joseph Conrad’s son Borys took a copy of one of his father’s novels – the short masterpiece The Shadow-Line – with him when he went away to fight in the First World War.

The Secret Life of Books is also full of interesting details pertaining to things like personalised book illustrations. For instance, I hadn’t heard of Grangerising before – the name for adding illustrations of your own to a book you possess – but Mole tells us that the verb was derived from James Granger’s Biographical History of England (1769), many copies of which readers chose to embellish in such a way. I’d also forgotten the wonderful story about Philip Larkin – who famously described himself as an ‘Anglican agnostic’ – installing a lectern in his room so he could read the Bible while shaving of a morning. As Mole goes on to remark, ‘I’m not sure whether this mode of reading influenced his conclusion that the Bible was “absolute balls”.’

The Secret Life of Books, then, is a readable and highly accessible study of the book as a physical object in the world. Mole wears his learning lightly, and draws on personal experience as well as literary anecdotes to illuminate his way as he negotiates the past, present, and future journeys of the book as object.

Source: interestingliterature.com show less

‘’Books are part of how we understand ourselves. They shape our identities, even before we can read them. They accompany us throughout our lives. [...] They get tangled up in our relationships with parents, siblings, classmates, teachers, friends, lovers and children. They are part of how groups of people, and even nations, imagine and represent themselves. Books become meaningful objects in all sorts of ways: treasured possessions, talismans, bearers of significance. This book is about how that happens.’’

There are readers who desire their books to look as immaculate as fresh snow. Others, like yours truly, want them to look lived in, with dog-eared pages and scribbles in the margins. We keep them in our bookcases as tokens of show more our personality, our knowledge, our convictions. We refuse to obey the rule of common sense and we accumulate them by the dozen, ending up with stacks scattered all over because free space is just an illusion. We fall in love with characters and storylines. Our first journey ‘’abroad’’ probably took place through an exciting book.

We meet heroes and villains, people of the past who shaped our present. We find a way to escape from dark times and personal instability and insecurity. We became friends (and lovers…) with someone who shares our passion for the same books, we fight and refuse to ever speak again to the ones who offend our book choices. We marvel when we find a book with uncut pages, a glimpse into a world beyond our reach. We become as inquisitive as it gets when we visit a house with an impressive (or not) bookcase, our eyes and necks straining to browse through the titles.

We are the ones who can’t get enough of bookish gifts. We are tormented by the question ‘’what will happen to my books after I am gone.’’ We are terrified by the prospect that our children may not worship on the altar of Literature. We are the ones who delight in reading the phone book. Literally. We are the ones who smile at the mere thought of the word ‘’book.’’ We are the ones who are granted a second and a third and a fourth life through the written word.

Is this the finest ‘’book-about-books’’ I’ve ever read? The answer is a loud, triumphant YES!

Many thanks to Alison Menzies and Elliott & Thompson for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ show less

A rare but not unique phenomenon occurred as I read 'The Secret Life of Books': I agreed with it so much that it actually started to get on my nerves. The ideas are expressed much more elegantly than I could manage, of course, but they seemed somewhat obvious. I responded to being told books are important as physical objects with some level of affront. You're telling me this? Me, a person who read 176 books last year, all of which were physical hardcopies? Me, who drags stacks of library books to and fro despite being perfectly well aware that e-readers exist? Me, who creepily smells the pages and fiddles with the edges of book covers as she reads them? This instinctive reaction was tempered by chagrin at my arrogance. Mole makes his show more points clearly and well, I just didn't need convincing of them.

After the initial consideration of books as objects, subsequent chapters consider them as markers of identity, signifiers of lifetime milestones, and links between people. Each chapter is fairly brief, as the whole book is only 200 pages long. Mole includes a range of historical examples and personal anecdotes to support his points, as well as some interludes illustrated with paintings. This structure reminded me of [a:Alberto Manguel|3602|Alberto Manguel|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1227041892p2/3602.jpg], a difficult writer to live up to. Unsurprisingly, Mole references Manguel and thanks him personally in the acknowledgements. I would have appreciated a more Manguel-esque level of depth and detail, making for a longer and possibly less accessible book. However I don't expect anyone to be writing for me alone, and there is a lot to appreciate in 'The Secret Life of Books' as it stands.

A particular joy is the linkage with Edinburgh, as Mole lives here and teaches at the University of Edinburgh. I was delighted to learn of 'The Fair Intellectual Club', a secret reading group of young women, founded in Edinburgh in 1717. Another excellent detail was Anne Fadiman's classification of 'courtly' and 'carnal' book lovers. I am probably closer to the carnal end of the spectrum, as I tend to inadvertently crack softback bindings and don't mind when books look worn. That said, I consider writing in books shocking and totally unacceptable. Mole also makes some thoughtful comments on e-books and how they lack many affordances of hardcopies, although ways of simulating these might be developed in future, e.g. virtual bookplates. He also reminded me about the importance of the spatial dimension when remembering a book's content. When searching for particular paragraph to quote, I sometimes remember the page number, but more often roughly how far through it was and whether it was on a right or left hand page. Approximate location is much easier to recall than the precise words. Likewise, I'm better at recalling the cover images and shelf locations of books than their titles and authors.

'The Secret Life of Books' was an easy and pleasant read, while feeling rather like being solemnly told to do something I've been doing enthusiastically for thirty years: appreciate the materiality and wider significance of books. One thing I'd have liked more discussion of is the difference in flow states when reading a book on paper or on an electronic device. Mole talks about how books disappear during reading, as your mind becomes immersed in the text. I love this flow state, obviously. I can experience it while reading on a laptop, but hardly ever on a smart phone. However it is much, much easier with a physical book. My theory is that I focus best on words when my hands are occupied with a physical object. Balancing the book and turning its pages enables me to read more intensively. On a laptop, my hands get fidgety with nothing to do but scroll down and I often switch between tabs or programs. With a smart phone, I'm so easily distracted by the annoyance of the touch screen that I'll put it down, do something else, and only remember hours later that I was reading an article. Similarly, I have to play cards, knit, or repeatedly plait my hair when listening to a podcast, otherwise I stop paying attention to it. I've no idea how common this pattern of experience is, although my aversion to smart phones seems unusual for my generation. There must be differences in how we focus while reading on paper and screens, though, and presumably research on the topic. Anyway, I definitely agree with Mole that books are wonderful and would happily read more from him, in greater detail, on the subject. show less

I am a book addict. There I have said it. They seem to consume my life at the moment. I have read more than ever this year, so much so that I am going to finish my Good Reads Challenge a month early this year. I spend lots of time in bookshops and charity shops looking for new things to read and the bargains. I have 12 bookcases around the home, all full to overflowing and ever-increasing tsundoku (piles of books) that my long-suffering wife is now commenting about…

Like Tom, I always look at the books when I visit someone’s home, even if I have been there many times before. Your library is a rare glimpse into your very soul. Shockingly, I have even been to houses where there are no books. NO BOOKS! (Yes this is a real thing). They show more feel empty and barren. There is much more to a physical book than thin slices of a tree with random marks on. I don’t know quite what it is about books that makes them so appealing. Perhaps it is the heft that you get from a quality hardback, or the detail that goes into binding them or for the price of a couple of coffees you can have an entertaining few hours venturing into another world that someone has created or that you can learn something about our amazing world and the people in it. For me, though I find their presence in my home reassuring, that I can access knowledge and experiences from other people by taking a book off the shelf.

Tom Mole is another fellow obsessive book collector. (It’s not hoarding if it’s books) He works at the University of Edinburgh and is Professor of English Literature and Book History, so he is perfectly placed to write this book about books. Beginning with clay tablets and papyrus he takes us all the way through the scrolls to the codex format that we see all around us today. You will learn about binding errors, how we can become utterly absorbed in the magic that is reading, how some people manage to read their books and leave them utterly pristine and others who pass them on (or horror of horrors back) most foxed and often slightly badgered too. There is a certain amount of pleasure in owning a signed book, even more so if it is dedicated.

Some people develop relationships with their copies of favourite books, scribbling notes, folding the corners of the pages down, leaving splatters from cooking and adding their own unique and distinctive embellishments. There is a chapter on how books can affect people’s lives and two on the future direction and technology of books? Is it kindles? Or apps on a phone? The physical object is resilient to the ravages of time there are books around that are hundreds of years old that can still be read, whereas if you have a novel on a 5 1/4″ floppy disk then you will be extremely lucky if you can ever read that again.

It is a well-researched book stuffed full of interesting anecdotes and facts and Mole has done a great job in not making this feel like a slightly stuffy academic paper. The chapters are short and can be dipped into in no particular order and I liked the brief interludes. If you have the remotest interest in reading or books then I can highly recommend this book. Great stuff. show less

How meta! A book about books. This gentle non fiction explores books, books as objects, books in their relationship to our sense of self, books as things that build and define relationships with others, books that mark stages of life, books that shape and categorise knowledge... it is surprisingly easy to read, and none of it felt like a Radical New Thought, but it is thoughtful and well structured and a delightful tour of the world of books and how they shape humanity.

Although there exist many books on the subject of the value of books and libraries, this small tome yet manages to contribute a bit of something new. Unlike many of those other authors, Mole builds up from his thoughts about the book, and a book, toward further reflections on books in the aggregate, libraries: "when gathered together in large numbers, books make a kind of argument that's different from the argument you find spelled out in their pages."

There is sui generis value to libraries that is not reducible to the books, so we are not surprised to hear that "Students want to work alongside those endless shelves, even if they can access the texts they need on their laptops." Because "I experience libraries and bookshops as spaces show more of enormous potential, which invite me to imagine new avenues of intellectual exploration, new pathways of reading pleasure," intellectual labor happens easier and more successfully in libraries, just by being there, amidst the books, even without pulling a single one from the shelf. show less

An interesting book about books, reading and the influence they both have on lives. Divided into chapters about Book/Book; Book/Thing; Book/Self; Book/Relationship; Book/Life; Book/World; Book/Technology and Book/Future with interludes of famous paintings that include relationships with books. Yes it's a book about books but I found it very interesting, then again I am a librarian and it's my field of interest. The weakest, I thought, was the chapter on the future of the book but overall it's a book worth reading if you're interested in the past, present and future of reading and how it shapes our lives.