Probably all of us have felt it at one point or another. For some, it comes in the form of an obsession with story—the drive to know what happens next, to revel in character and incident and situation, to follow a plot as it arcs and swoops and blossoms (or crashes and implodes). For some it manifests as a hunger to know (admission: I probably fall most fully in this camp)—a need to filter and absorb the world through language, a compulsion to cram as much as possible of what’s out there into the space in here between the ears. For many people these days it has a technophilic edge—a delight in the slender tile that houses a library, in the riches available at the touch or the swipe of a finger, in the back-lit vibrancy of a photograph and text beautifully laid out on an HD screen. And for some it still carries that same old deep physical satisfaction that Shakespeare and Austen and Dickens would have known—of holding in your hand something that has the heft and the endurance worthy of a block chiseled off the edifice of human culture.
Sandy McAdams, proprietor of Daedalus Books, has a name for it: “the mysterious attraction of books.” And in this Festival of the Book edition of C-VILLE, we’re taking some time to explore what that means to folks in various corners of our decidedly biblio-centric little town.
You can still find purists in this world (another admission: hand up, head hung—guilty as charged) who will say that the electronic flicker can never be a satisfying substitute for that stack of paper and boards. But take a step back and broaden the focus a bit, and even I can see how narrow that idea is.
This thing we know as the printed book has been around for 500-some years. Before that, and of course since then, the marriage of word and image has been available in a dizzying variety of forms: from papyrus scrolls to illuminated manuscripts to block-printed sheets of rice paper. The earliest writing is preserved on clay tablets that are 5,000 years old. And lately there’s been some indication that lines and symbols in cave paintings dating to 35,000 years ago are actually early efforts at symbolic communication. From cave wall to mud slab to papyrus to vellum to paper and now on to pixels, “the book” has always been a multi-media affair.
The ways in which we use and encounter and absorb the written word into our lives are just as varied. In the stories that follow, we hear about some of the ways that emotional and intellectual connections to the written word can lead to new possibilities in life, deeper understanding, a hipper way to be, and, yes, even a career path. All that personal alchemy happens because language is a conduit—it’s a communication cable connecting our inner lives with those of our fellow human beings. Books these days can take many forms, but the one thing they all share is this: They are tools for connecting individuals together into a culture across time.