Some of my best loved books ought not to be on display,
not because of the racy contents but because of their ratty covers. They no longer look so good on the outside!I really notice an absence of books when I walk in to a home that has stacks of DVDs and cables to video game peripherals snaking across the floor of the most-lived-in-room.
CURIOUS SIDE BAR: How is a child's worldview influenced by growing up in a home with books and reading adults -vs- in a tech only environment? Some would argue that the tech world is unlimited. Others might counter that the aesthetic absence of the tactile feel and smell of pre-loved books is sadly lost.
Get Russell Smith's take on how the times are a changing.
So while I know it makes far more sense to take a Kindle or iPad on holiday with me, especially if I'm flying, there's still something to be said about being surrounded by old friends in the form of books you've spent some enjoyable hours with. They don't ask for much more than shelf space.In the age of the e-book, what will happen to bookshelves? How will we decorate our apartments? How will we judge our prospective partners?I am living in the aftermath of a move, where as usual the books have been the most obstructive and expensive and dustiest element. They have been moved from student room to disastrous relationship to shared house to storage locker for 20 years now, and they have not suffered, indeed they have proliferated as they migrated, like a great nomadic herd. Many of them have traversed this vast country more than once; some have crossed an ocean. My books thrive on upheaval: It causes them to spawn.
Before every move, I perform a heartbreaking yet necessary cull. And still on every move there are 10 more boxes than there were before. When I am grown up, I will have a carpenter build me bookcases of actual wood, but by then there will be no more books.
I paid movers this time, and they were dismayed but half amazed too. “Have you read all these?” asked one, and I said yes, although the truth is complicated. I’m not even the obsessive bibliophile type: I have very few first editions, most are paperbacks, and there are very few I would not use as a coaster or doorstop. I know guys who keep their books behind smoked glass and won’t let you rest your spectacles on top of one.
Book-walls are just aesthetic now, just an unusually dense wallpaper: We don’t really need them for consultation. I can probably find the complete text of most of them online within an hour. It’s the same for CDs: If you have the time to copy them all, you can throw them all away and buy music online for the rest of your life. In the future, we will live in ever-smaller houses with ever-larger TV screens, so you need all the wall-space you have. And all our books will be invisible, like our music: The sum total of our literary experience will be a list of file names on a grey plastic machine in a briefcase. [Or an iPad for Mac users.]This will make for much more overburdened computers and much less cluttered apartments. Bric-a-brac is generally unfashionable now. Designers see apartments full of amusing memorabilia – the matchboxes from Berlin, the Soweto tin car, all the stuff that children love – as dust-gathering and space-consuming. We no longer respect the Cabinet of Wonders as a guiding principle of decoration.
So we lose forever the pleasure known to humanity for 500 years of taking a stroll up and down the aisles of someone else’s brain by perusing their bookshelves. Gone will be the guilty joy of spending a rainy afternoon at a cottage with the remnants of someone else’s childhood: their Nancy Drews, their 1970s National Geographics." RS
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