A very long post entitled BOO, HISS

Recently I popped into Barnes and Noble to take advantage of their after Christmas sale and there, just inside the front entrance, was a display that raised my hackles. (And I should probably add that my hackles do not easily get raised – especially in public.) A rather sheepish looking but terribly earnest young man was in the process of telling a handful of curious readers all about the new Barnes and Noble E-Reader.

I was outraged! First the big box book stores came to town and bullied my beloved Canterbury Bookshop into shutting its doors. (I still mourn its demise. It was a true haven for people who love to read – a warm and comfortable place filled with a great selection of books that were perfect for browsing. There were comfortable chairs tucked away in little nooks and crannies where we could spend as long as we liked flipping through the pages of whatever had caught our fancy. Best of all there was Trudy, the gentle wisp of a bookseller whose inspiration it was to create Canterbury Bookshop in the first place and who treated her customers as if she had opened the shop specifically for them.) But I digress. It's bd enough that Borders, and Barnes and Nobles have pretty much taken over the book selling business. But at least they were selling books. Now it looks like books could be headed for the same fate as independent booksellers – at least that’s what the people who have brought us e-books would have us believe.

But to get back to my reaction upon seeing the e-book display at Barnes and Noble....as I was saying, I was outraged! Which was why I huffed myself up and marched right over to the display and tossed out an angry BOO, HISS as a means of letting it be known that I for one am not going to take lightly this assault on what, in my opinion, is one of humankind's finest acheivements - the creation of the book.

I think my love of books probably began way back when I was small enough to nestle up next to my mother as she read to my brother and me. It was a gift she gave me and it reminds me of that rather schmaltzy little ditty by Strictland Gillilan that ends with the lines... "You may have tangible wealth untold; caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be – I had a mother who read to me.”


I can remember looking at those mysterious squiggly looking shapes on the page in front of her as she read and thinking that reading was a very magical thing, and someday I would be able to do it all by myself.

Mother tells me that the first time she took me to the children’s room of our local library (in the basement of one of those wonderful old Carnegie libraries that, sadly enough, was demolished in the 70’s and replaced with something much more up to date but greatly lacking in ambiance) I took one look at all the books and told her I planned to read every one of them.


It was just the beginning of a life long passion for books. And the older I get, the more that passion grows. At age 64 it’s a sobering thought to realize that even if I were to spend every waking hour of the rest of my life with my nose in a book I would probably not make it to the end of the list of books I hope to read in my lifetime. That’s because I keep adding titles to that list. As a result the bookshelves in our house (and there are many of them) keep getting crammed with more and more books.



Sometimes I fantasize about spending an entire week, or maybe a month if I really wanted to be decadent, reading in bed. I’d only have to emerge now and then, long enough to go to the bathroom and perhaps take a shower if absolutely necessary.

But to return to my original subject – my rant against E-books: Part of the problem I have with the whole concept of electronic books is that they simply aren’t books. They’re gadgets that allow a person to have instant access to words, which is fine, but books do more than merely present me with a bunch of words. I think the difference has to do with why we read in the first place. If we’re reading simply to acquire information, there’s no doubt that E-books will deliver. The technology makes it possible to search around on the internet for the information you’re seeking, click on a link and then download what you’ve found to your computer, IPOD, laptop, or (I presume) your E-reader. So, it’s fine for those who are looking for immediate access to information. But...that’s certainly not the only reason I read.

I read for the sheer and exhilarating pleasure that books can provide. Not only the pleasure that comes from reading words, but just as importantly for the sensory pleasure that goes along with taking a book off the shelf and experiencing what’s inside.

For me, reading is a sensory pleasure. Take the way books smell, for example. Admittedly this may seem a little odd, but one of the first things I do when I open a new book is take a good sniff or two. (Appropriately enough, for someone who has been accused of spending too much time with her nose in a book.) I don’t know what it is about certain books, but there’s something about the way they smell that is definitely one of my all time favorite fragrances. Maybe it’s because the first book that smelled that way was one my mother read to me. It was a big, thick story book and I used to put my face right down next to the pages so I could smell the magic that was there as mother read about fairy princesses and golden spinning wheels and enchanted castles. Every once in a while I find a book that exudes that very same magical fragrance and I’m reminded once again of how wonderful it is to wander into the realm of the make-believe. I have never sniffed an E-reader, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t do much for me.

Neither would the way it feels. Books on the other hand are wonderfully tactile. We have a small collection of books that were printed at the turn of the previous century by the Roycrofters , a community of artists and artisans that flourished in East Aurora, New York around the turn of the previous century and was instrumental in influencing the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States.


Roycrofter books are works of art in and of themselves. Some of them feature suede or even leather bindings and covers. . .



. . . and all of them are beautifully printed on fine quality paper and embellished with hand-colored initials and illuminations by the artists who worked for the Press.



There’s just no way an E-book could ever capture what makes these books such a pleasure to pick up...and feel....and look at....and read.

I think that part of the pleasure of books is visual. Some books are lavishly illustrated and a sheer joy to look at not only because of the skill and artistry that went into creating the illustrations but also because of the way they are laid out on the page in order to correspond to the text. Here is an example from , The Illuminated Rumi, by Coleman Barks and Michael Greene.


It’s hard to imagine an e-book doing credit to these beautiful illustrations – or the way they have been presented as part of the text itself. So for someone who loves to read, not only because of the words found on the page, but also for the sensory pleasure of the book itself, an E-book just isn’t going to provide what I’m looking for. And as for what the earnest young man at Barnes and Noble pointed out about how portable these electronic gadgets are, I have to repeat what I said earlier: Boo, hiss. Unless for some inconceivable reason I might want to lug around a volume containing all the works of Shakespeare, or perhaps the Oxford dictionary in its entirety, most books I want to take with me can be carried along quite easily. Granted I have been known to pack entire boxes of books to take along when leaving for a vacation because I simply can’t imagine going anywhere without a generous supply of books. Nevertheless, I’d still rather do it that way than pack a single E-book. For all the reasons I’ve already mentioned.

For Christmas I received as I always do, several books I’d been hoping I’d get. One of them is Classics for Pleasure, by Michael Dirda, the book critic for the Washington Post and author of several other books about the joys of reading, including An Open Book, a memoir about how he came to be such a book lover. No sooner had I started the introduction to his latest book than I came across another good reason for why I can’t imagine living without good books to read. He says:

“More than anything else, great books speak to us of our own very real feelings and failings, of our all-too-human daydreams and confusions...Sappho’s heartache is that of anyone who has ever been hopelessly in love. Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel starkly reveals both the horror and exhilaration of war. The Book of Common Prayer reliably comforts us in times of sorrow, uplifts us in times of celebration....On those evenings when the world is too much with us, 221B Baker Street, home to Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, has long offered a warm fire and snug refuge. Come April or May, we will always awake some Saturday morning like Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, to the wonder and beauty of spring.”

Now, some may argue that all of that is just as possible by down-loading any of those titles on to an E-reader as it is by taking them off a shelf somewhere. I’m not so sure. All it takes for me is to compare the following two versions of Jane Austen's beloved Pride and Prejudice to convince me which one I'd rather pick up and read....