 The Secret Confluence of BooksbyGillian PolackWhile I was travelling recently, I spent a lot of my time with writers and with critics and with academics. There was overlap between the categories. There was overlap (huge overlap) between that and another category: my friends. This is why you didn’t get instantly pictures of their bookshelves with “Look, this is what a writer reads.” Or even “Study this library while you can, because this writer is private.” I wanted to, but the fact that they were comfortable with me raiding their bookshelves and commenting on their prize volume meant that I had the responsibility to try not to abuse my privilege. It’s a pity, because all of their bookshelves were fascinating. In fact, if I hadn’t had a very strict (and alas, far too small) limit on the weight of my baggage, much of their libraries would have found new homes in Australia. The big thing that struck me, however, was that we none of us have books—we all have libraries. All the friends I saw and all their friends talked books, but all the books we talked about were also in contexts with other books. Two sets of friends had libraries that extended over every floor of a multi-floored house (I nearly packed their whole houses into my suitcase) while others confined their libraries to a set number of locations and shelves. All volumes were all, however, carefully collected and brought together. Books were put beside other books with whom they shared an affinity. Careful collection was undertaken. And if a book was out on loan (to a friend, to a student) then it was missed and its absence was indicated. This is something that all people who write and who think about books share. This essay is not going to be a wonderment about how ever we are going to organise our books electronically with the same love and care as my friends organise their books physically. I have my own electronic library, and moreover, it has classifications and friendships and books that must be shared with others. Today I am rather thinking about what makes us collect words together in so many ways and why this type of meaning—books on shelves—is so very important to us. Books are so important to me that I give them human attributes. Did you notice, in my second paragraph, that the books were ‘with whom’ and not ‘with which.’ This has to be a part of it. Words make characters and stories and tales or they create information into fascinating dioramas. They can be simple and complex and wayward and frantic. Maybe they aren’t people, but they certainly take on some human characteristics in the mind and heart of the book-lover. The component parts of a book help with this. Is the paper crisp and creamy, or is it soft and dragging? Can you see through a page when you hold it up to the light? Does it rest open on a desk, or close itself firmly the moment you stop reading? And what does the cover look like? I still look at every single book I buy and every review book I’m sent and I think about the cover. Right now, I have several covers on my mind. There is the cover of volume one of Mills and Ledroit’s Requiem - chevalier vampire, which has (as friend and writer Matthew Farrer—who writes Warhammer books for the most part—just pointed out) a Michael Moorcock feel. There’s the cover of Joel Shepherd’s Haven, with its girl-on-horseback, which makes me think how fantasy adventure often has to glamourise war on the cover and then undermine that glamour inside. There’s my HG Wells pamphlet (picked up in York at a most excellent bookshop where I was dragged by a rather insistent Brain Wainwright—whose own library I didn’t see, but whose writing includes Within the Fetterlock and The Adventures of Alienore Audley) “This Misery of Boots.” (“The World as Boots and Superstructure,” it begins. “It does not do” said a friend of mine, “to think about boots.” And really, it doesn’t, because the moment one thinks about them one is drawn out of the topic and into quite a different one.) I’m also thinking about the differences between the cover of Pierre Revel’s books in French and in English and wondering if the differences will show up in the content. Every cover I look at makes me think, and every book I open makes me think some more. They talk to me and so I talk about them. It’s a happy relationship. Covers lead to other things. They lead into the books. They lead into worlds of their own. Typesetting does too, but I’ve been proofreading my own next book all week and it’s being typeset as I type this and so fonts and kerning and making text beautiful for the eye really doesn’t bear thinking of. It's part of the whole thing, however. It’s part of why we think about books as belonging together and why a certain sub-set of human beings create libraries. Books mentioned in this column:
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