A Passion for Reading

From a French Book of Hours

Is reading a passionate exercise? Lisa Jardine CBE, author and historian, seems to think so. In a column in the BBC’s Magazine section, she writes,

I have always cherished an active relationship with my books. I forge an intense bond with every volume that helps shape my ideas and understanding. It becomes much more than simply a tool for providing information.

Throughout the article, Jardin gives several examples of book-love. She writes about Stephen Dance, a 1640s reader who cursed anyone who might steal his devotional book of Psalms, of an unnamed owner who threatened hanging in return for theft. Later, she describes the beauty of the handwritten word, of illuminated manuscripts, of annotation-filled margins–her column is, as @lbgilbert called it, “a paean to the passion of reading”.

And while I agree with Jardin’s point of view, I’m still forced to take issue with it. To flog a Shakespearean metaphor to death, her column is about the summer’s day of books, gorgeous and glowing and splendiferous because illuminated manuscripts, handwritten books, and thoughtfully annotated margins are gorgeous and glowing and splendiferous. And that’s all well and good, but what about used books?

Used books are the book-lover’s lowly mistress, their covers care-worn, their pages dog-eared. They have no gorgeous, summery aura, and their must is more like rank breath than their purveyors would care to admit. But, as in the sonnet, a used book’s appearance often belies its inner beauty.

And just what is that beauty? Accessibility. Until the printing press and the dissemination of books among the masses, manuscripts such as Jardin describes were Rich and Religious Folk Only. Post-Gutenberg, handwritten books remained in vogue–printed matter didn’t completely replace them so much as level the playing field. Later, when handwritten volumes did disappear, they were replaced with special editions, a practice continued today by institutions such as The Folio Society.

Used–or, more poetically, secondhand–books, have been around since Roman times. Rarely are they glamorous (though the UK used-and-new store, Shakespeare and Company, has appeared in a few films). Until literacy became more widespread in the 20th century, books remained largely unneeded by the masses, limiting the secondhand book trade to formerly wealthy families and lesser educated classes, such as priests, curators and their families (think Charlotte Bronte). Later, between the literacy boom and popular fiction, secondhand bookstores garnered a greater marketshare.

Today, used books are an important commodity. They’re owned rather than borrowed, inexpensive enough to give to children still learning about book-love or to mark. And, with the prices of new books increasing they’re cheap enough for readers to explore new authors without the threat of an overdue lending fee. In some places, a reading copy of a secondhand volume is actually less than subway fare. Avid readers of a particular author may also scour secondhand bookstores for out-of-print or hard-to-find titles. And used textbooks are popular–the Harvard Coop in Cambridge runs a brisk used textbook trade, as do many other school and university bookstores.

To return to one of Jardin’s points–reading, and, moreover, forging relationships with books, is a worthy exercise. But books don’t have to antiquarian, or vintage, or in mint condition to be appreciated. Leafing through a beat-up copy of Bronte is just as rewarding as leafing through a sterile new one–perhaps more so.

To me, secondhand books aren’t musty so much as they are loved. Someone else has read the book, has cared for it, has, if I’m lucky, underlined passages and drawn pictures. While this sort of marginalia may not be as exciting as Jardin’s illuminations, it’s still valuable–seeing the way another’s mind works is a story in itself. Some books even feel as if they have personalities all their own–neurotic, anal, cliched, prim, snarky, humorous. They may be a little beat up, even torn, but I am passionate about them all the same.