I was reading George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical last week and the Penguin paperback basically disintegrated. Toward the end I was picking up pages off the floor and reinserting them in a futile effort to keep some semblance of authorial intent.
And it occurred to me that while Penguin does us a huge service by making great texts cheaply available at least in some form, their books are deplorable as examples of book-making. Most of my extensive collection of Penguins make me unconsciously careful when I reach for them.
I compared that to my old paperback Ignatius Press series: fantastic paper, binding, stitching, glue. They’ve shown no sign of deterioration in decades of hard reading.
And that thought led me back to the old Everyman series: bound in leather, gorgeous books, and sturdy: I have two copies of Lord Dunsany’s Book of Wonder printed in the 1920’s and 1930’s that are in fine shape, though the paper is a lovely yellow and smells of vanillin in the best way.
I’ve got a few Bibles and a Quran that I’ve had forever: religious people are awfully careful to make sure their books last.
What are your best physical books?
When I was teaching high school history I would talk about how my favorite book was The Sun Also Rises when covering the Lost Generation.
Well, I was with one of the English teachers at the time and we went through a pretty public divorce during the school year. Nothing dramatic, but we went from “the married couple” to “the divorced teachers.”
I had a lot of awesome students that year, and at the end of the school year I had one gift me a copy of The Sun Also Rises hardcopy.
On the inside cover she wrote a short note thanking me for the time, energy as encouragement I gave her that year. Down at the bottom she wrote ”I hope you find all the happiness you’re looking for.”
I obviously already owned a copy, but now I have two, and that one is my favorite.