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?
I have a few extremely old antique books I found while cleaning out my grandmother’s house following her death. All from the 1920s, they are small identification guides, one for birds, one for trees, one for flowers, and a fourth I’m not remembering right now. They are in rough shape but still holding together. The bird book especially has amazingly detailed full color artist made images throughout. I have no idea if they have any value, but there’s something cool about the level of craft and care that seems to have gone into them, the images seem impressive to me considering their age. Maybe it’s less impressive than I think, I don’t actually know how publishing worked back then, but they’re cool to me.