Do you remember the first book you ever owned? The first one you ever loved? The first one that really knocked you on your ass?
I remember loving Bartholomew and the Oobleck, one of the slightly more serious — and wordy — Dr. Seuss stories. I loved Sherlock Holmes. I loved The Hobbit so much the first time I read it (third grade) that I started making maps of fantasy lands and writing stories about elves and goblins and wizards, a habit I kept up for more than a decade. A Tale of Two Cities (sixth grade) was perhaps the first serious book I read that really messed with my head. War and Peace was the first big book I tried — I pulled it off my grandma’s shelves one summer — that I gave up on. Michener’s Hawaii (eighth grade) was, embarrassingly, the first book I can remember having something like an erotic relationship with. The Scarlet Letter was the first book that so completely floored me (sure, I’d read it before, in high school, and even as an undergrad, but I was way too young to get it) that on encountering it in grad school I read it five times in a row, with no break. It replaced Beloved as my favorite novel, but it eventually lost out to Moby-Dick, which to this day reigns supreme.
Maybe it was Stella’s recent post on a similar topic or my own earlier thoughts on being a writer, but I’ve been thinking lately about my interactions with books, about how readers feel about books in various situations or stages of life, about how books can and can’t change you or the world at large. Caleb Crain’s written some terrific posts on related topics over on Steamboats Are Ruining Everything. I recently encountered an amazing grad school applicant (alas, we lost her to another school uptown) who’s theorizing the ways readers in certain historical situations have thought of books as extensions of the human body. And for the last few days in particular — sitting for several hours at a time in an intensive history workshop at the Huntington in LA — the notion of the “material text” has turned up again and again: what it means to study books as objects; how, as objects, they interact with people; and how those interactions, at times, leave traces on the object that almost inevitably outlast a book’s human owners.
The idea of the material text has been fundamental to several academic fields in the last decades — book history, print culture, literary history, material culture studies, cultural history. My own department is starting up a faculty working group on the topic, which seems to have been thrown to the fore even more forcefully on the advent of the digital archive. Suddenly, scholars who work in fields like mine are able not simply to read enormous numbers of books from centuries past, all in the comfort of our own offices, but we’re able to search them as well! The new resources are creating new sorts of histories as people trace individual words and phrases, mapping a culture’s language patterns with more empirical grounding than ever before. Searchable databases of magazines and newspapers have also revolutionized this kind of research. But this ease and abundance also seems to have created a form of nostalgia for the book as an object, almost as if we fear it’s an endangered species.
And so all this searchable digital reproduction, it appears, can’t yet fully replace the experience of sitting down with a book in hand. (I have to admit that even thought it’s bad for the environment, I still print out a lot of those digital reproductions, because I need to write on them as I read, mark my interactions, carry them with me on the subway, read them in the bathroom, keep them in file cabinets or stacked in my office according to my own organizational or disorganizational systems.) Nor can such databases account fully for the materiality of other kinds of texts we find significant, from letters to tombstones, or the material contexts in which reading and writing happened in the past. One of the most interesting papers we workshopped at the Huntington this week was written by a historian of material culture who wrote about objects that were related, in various ways, to the production of writing, including elaborate German Schreibzeug — fantastically carved desksets that, we assume, signaled to writers something about themselves and their relationship to what they wrote.
What can your books tell other people about you? How do you treat them? Do you write your name in books? Do you put a date in the inside cover to remember when and where you bought it? I once bought a used book that had the previous owner’s name, the date he bought it, and the weather that day (cloudy, 55 degrees F.), which I thought was a lovely touch.
A colleague of mine is writing some beautiful stuff about marginalia in children’s books from the nineteenth century: little poems about ownership, warning book thieves away. Or the peculiar possessive formulation you find in almost any book from that period: “Mary Johnston, Her Book.” Or the ways in which children’s books mean something altogether new to a parent after a child has grown, or especially if a child has died. Recently Stephanie and I were in a bookstore looking for a gift for a friend who’s expecting a baby. I scrambled through shelves looking for anything familiar — it’s been over a decade, after all, since we’ve purchased baby books for our own kids — but we finally found one we had read over and over to both girls. We stood there in the bookstore reading it together and both found ourselves tearing up.
When I was a kid I marked my books by writing my name across the top edge of the volume. I often wrote “Bryan,” but sometimes I marked them the same way my dad did: “H2O♂” I had a stack of old paperback MAD books my dad had given me, a collection fleshed out by our joint trips to used bookstores when we traveled, all with my name across the top. A few years ago, recognizing that my daughter Molly had a sense of humor compatible with the MAD cartoonist Don Martin, I bequeathed the collection to her for Christmas.
Do you love books, gentle reader? Do you think about yourself as owning them? Do you think of yourself as having been shaped by them? Do you, in turn, write in books — engage them in conversation, impose meanings on them? Do you write books? Do you recommend them, give them as gifts, prefer to buy them new or used? Do you collect them?
And what exactly do such phrases mean to you?
I have too many books, but I can’t stand to get rid of them. A few are beautiful as objects. Most are paperbacks, which I generally prefer for their pleasing, utilitarian lack of pretentiousness. (Although I really love those European paperbacks with the covers folded into flaps in lieu of a dust jacket — utilitarian and pretentious at the same time.) I would trade most of my books for a searchable database of them along with a nicely portable e-text reader, since I mostly keep books around on the off chance I’ll need a particular passage.
Favorite books as a kid: Sherlock Holmes, Tolkein, the Great Brain books, hundreds of others. The first book that kicked my ass was Catch-22; the second, which kicked it much harder, was Absalom, Absalom.
I think I was in fourth grade when I tried to read The Shining. I had no idea what it was about, but all the expletives were exciting. Later, in high school, I did read The Shining (and pretty much every Stephen King book pre-Tommyknockers), staying up until I could get far enough past the scary parts to sleep.
I have always been obsessed with books. I would prop my book up behind the kitchen faucet and read it while I did my chore of the family dishes. While everyone watched Nightrider, I was reading The Hardy Boys. I loved all the Roald Dahl stuff. I read Judy Blume’s Tiger Eyes at least 10 times between the ages of 12 and 15. When I was 18, my friends passed around Didion’s Play It as It Lays— my first foray into truly contemporary stuff– and I was hooked. Recently (and much discussed on this blog) Comac McCarthy’s The Road took me prisoner. And…the first book to really change my understanding of “writing” and “literature” was To the Lighthouse in my final year as an undergrad. On one of the first times I met her, SWells said that this book was, in her opinion, a “perfect” novel. I have loved SWells and Virginia Woolf ever since.
I do not believe in holding on to objects, in general. I am not a “pack rat” personality– more of a “purger”– and don’t own too many objects that represent some kind of nostalgic discourse with myself. That said, I love to pass on books to whoever wants to read. I’d rather share a book with a total stranger than have it sit on my shelf gathering dust. I like the idea that my library is truly a library– books for borrowing– and I don’t really care if they return. Hopefully, they’re being passed on and on and…
I do, however, have a beautiful printing of Charlotte’s Web that I was given when I was 3 It will never be loaned out.
(LTLFTP)
My mother encouraged me from an early age to read as much as I could. She used to get herself 7-8 new novels every week from the library, a statistic that still amazes me. FYI Dave, she read the first Great Brain novel to me after I heard my older brother talking about it. I then went on to read and re-read the entire series thirty-two bazillion times.
Although I have returned to reading faithfully every day, my glory years we’re definitely in my younger days, ages 8 to 14ish. From Beverly Cleary to Judy Blume to Paul Zindel. Matt Christopher’s sports books. My first flirting with sci-fi from John Christopher’s “Tripid” trilogy, Madeleine L’Engle and of course Tolkein. I couldn’t get enough and it was even considered to be “cool” amongst my group of friends. Things changed after a traumatic move to Texas. Perhaps it was the lack of friends with the same interests, but I didn’t seek books out much for a long period of time. The only things I was reading were assignments from English class, which seemed like a chore back then. But in hindsight, all those books stuck in me, and spurred me to return to my love for literature years later.
One of my favorite times each day is the 10 minute subway ride to and from work where I can read. I often wish the ride was longer, and I’m one of the few people who loves when the train gets stuck between stations for a few extra, glorious minutes!
I have way too much to say on this topic and way too little time to say it right now. I might have to do a post on it. Briefly, my relationship with books has shifted in multiple ways over my life — most recently from teaching them to selling them. As much as I am drawn to go into it more right now, I just can’t. Much more later.
Yes, the enormity of this subject is limiting the number and length of responses, I suspect. Tim the other day mentioned Rob Sheffield’s book “Love Is A Mix Tape,” which made me go back to it, and at one point R.S. says, “I love my iPod carnally.” That’s sort of how I feel about my books. And whenever I move, after the 50th or 60th book box, one of the movers invariably says, “Are you a teacher or something?”
As a kid I devoured Lloyd Alexander and Roald Dahl. Dahl’s “The Amazing Story of Henry Sugar” haunted me for years (still does!), and yet I know few others who have read it. Anyone?
In high school, reading Emerson for the first time changed everything and made me want to study literature as a career. Nowadays copping to loving Emerson strikes some as jejeune, but I have a lot to thank (blame?) him for.
For about ten years I read Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” every fall when the weather started to turn, because it was the perfect curl-up-with-hot-tea read. Phrases from that novel still tumble through my thoughts at regular intervals. When I told a grad school friend, she mentioned that she had gone to Bennington with Tartt and workshopped the book with her. Freaked. Me. Out.
For a while I was really into May Sarton and we had a brief correspondence. I spent a day with her shortly before she died, which is one of my most treasured memories. It’s funny how I still think of authors as rock stars, when I don’t even think of rock stars as rock stars anymore.
Probably my favorite books are my full editions of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, which cost me a cool $700 one blustery day in Hyde Park. Haven’t regretted them for a second.
Most ass-kicking? Shakespeare, now and forever. Want to see my facsimile of the First Folio? I love it. Carnally.
I have read “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”!! and loved it, but it’s no “Danny, the Champion of the World.” and I read all the Great Brain books too, and am just now realizing something that I must ask you–hey, those guys were Mormons, weren’t they?
Like Tim, I have much much more to say on this topic (I’m sure we all must!) but have to reiterate what LT so kindly quotes me as gushing: “To the Lighthouse” is, absolutely, the most perfect novel ever written.
Obsessed with print. Obsessed.
That’s the gentlest self-disclaimer I can manage.
For a while I was really into May Sarton and we had a brief correspondence. I spent a day with her shortly before she died, which is one of my most treasured memories. It’s funny how I still think of authors as rock stars, when I don’t even think of rock stars as rock stars anymore.
Lots to comment on about the comments, but the girls are anxious to play Guitar Hero, which a certain bar-owning friend bought for them while i was away. As for Rachel’s comment, excerpted, I remember when we stood in the university library and found, in May Sarton’s newly published volume of diaries, her entry in which she mentioned meeting Rachel. Damn! How cool was Rachel?
And Mike N! You’ve been de-lurked!
I’m pretty sure Rachel is a rock star. Oooh, The Secret History. Fucked up.
I also forgot about Paul Zindel. I was sad when I realized that I had grown out of him. Did you know that some districts banned The Pigman?
I recently bought my friend’s two year old daughter a t-shirt that says “I read banned books.” She calls it her “cool” shirt, but her mom says no one really gets it. I think people are unaware that books actually have been banned.
I read Henry Sugar!!! The turtle kid freaked me out more though.
Bryan I love this post–books for me are more than content, they are like emotional tattoos that I hold and cradle and travel to a precise moment of life. I keep them, stack them, take them out and turn to specific passages over and over. They are the pattern and the object.
I first cried at Charlette’s Web, first got turned on by a trashy romance called McLyon that I hid under my mattress, first lost my idealism in Lord of the Flies, first felt smart somewhere in Sound and the Fury, first discovered who I really was reading anything Salinger (Franny and Zooey and Esme’ and Seymour are my people).
I could go on and on, I read voraciously as a kid/ young person, less as a new mom, now I have settled into a routine–one book on CD in the car, one on the nightstand, one that I dabble in. They are not always Oprah-Literary but they make me happy.
I love books. Thank you Bryan for reminding me how much and why.
I, also, have too much to say on this subject to really do this topic and this post justice in my comment. But what a delightful post, Bryan. I love how you’re such a total scholar and yet, in an era dominated by Theory, you’re still so touchy-feely about literature…
I’ve wanted to be a book designer for a few years but have ended up designing more pdfs than I can count. Did you know that the outside margin of a book is called thumb space? I often look at how books are designed, margins, fonts, organization, style.
What Bryan wrote about inscribing a book with one’s name and date reminded me of how my grandmother cataloged the things in her life. I inherited her sewing patterns, fabric and cookbooks a few years ago. She recorded the date, place and price of every item she bought and the details of many recipes she made. She made scrapbooks full of recipes. I do too. These days I collect used cookbooks and sewing books. I’m fascinated how people were instructed to live in days past.
Beth — Have you ever read anything by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich? Hang on to all that stuff, and if you’re ever tempted to get rid of it, donate it to a research library instead. Ulrich won a Pulitzer for A Midwife’s Tale, a book based on a midwife’s diary from the late 18th century that previous scholars had written off as meaningless. She also does great work on material objects like fabric and furniture.
Jeremy — thanks for such a nice comment.
And thanks for so many reading recommendations. A lot of them I *hadn’t* read as a kid, so I’ll pick them up for mine.
The one huge influence, which I’m passing on to my kids this weekend (in memoriam) is The Chronicles of Prydain, by Lloyd Alexander.
Ditto for Madeleine L’Engle, who has been having her own wellness struggles.
Taran and Charles Wallace were, and are, two of my literary heroes.
Bryan, thank you for the recommendation. I haven’t read it. I looked up the author and the topics she writes about reminded me of a great book I read a few years ago, by Anne McDonald called No Idle Hands: A Social History of American Knitting. It starts in the 1600s and uses a lot of historical texts. It gives a different perspective to US history than one usually finds.