I’m reading a lovely bookish book at the moment by Susan Hill. It’s called Howards End is on the Landing (2009) and is subtitled A Year of Reading from Home. It’s about a year that she decided that she would only reading and exploring books she already owned. All those books that creep onto the shelves through the years, from second-hand bookshops and library booksales, with alluring titles or promises of literary enlightenment, but which simply do not get read. She muses in one of the chapters about why she has not read some of these books, classic books that she simply could not finish, or has not touched like George Eliot’s Romola, Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu or James Joyce’s Ulysses. She blames herself, not the author. They do not fit each other, a poor relationship. But I think there are other reasons. I was given this book as a gift and it has a beautiful hardback cover and dustjacket depicting old-style leather book-bindings. The cover says it all, really. At this point, I would like to quote or more probably misquote a book by Umberto Eco. I do not know the title, though it might have been In the Name of the Rose. I have never read it. But….a good friend who was reading it quoted me an amusing passage where one character says to another, when quizzed as to why he keeps so many books he has not read, ‘do you keep tins of canned meat after you have opened them?’
Ah yes, books are to be consumed and excreted, is that it? Once read, their allure dissipates. So, in this situation the cover is all important. The problem is that fictional and literary books tend to be bought by people with good imaginations. It seems to me that half the fun of a book is guessing at the contents, anticipating the world to which it might transport you. Like Susan Hill’s sense of Don Quixote (p.68), you conjure up an image of the character and plots from all the half-digested bits of newspaper book reviews and radio programmes about it you have encountered. If you were to actually creak open the red leather covers and carefully turn the tissue-thin pages, you run the risk of being disappointed. What if after all that, you do not actually like the book?
Then there are some books whose titles seem to say it all. Recently, I was chatting to someone and fell into the trap of saying ‘ah, that’s like that book The Seven Basic Plots’, then stumbling over my unintentionally imprecise language, exclaimed ‘I haven’t read it, but I imagine that would relate to that’. Well, the main argument does seem to be in the title: There are seven basic plots. I know I’m doing the work a shocking injustice given it took Christopher Booker 35 years to write. But I promise you, it’s on my list…definitely on my list.
I sense a recurring theme in these blog posts, rather like those books which set out the same idea from chapter to chapter with laborious heaping up of new anecdotes. Another reason not to read them. My apologies for the general repetition of my ideas, but my point is never to underestimate the power of a book cover. Books get judged by them. The blurb, the title, the look, feel and smell of a book. Last year, I attended a seminar by a publisher who said that when choosing books to stock, a seller would spend about ten minutes flicking through a catalogue, selecting items based on their title alone! A carefully worked out blurb would not even figure in these split-second decisions. I imagine you can find out more about this phenomenon in that book Blink, by who was it by now? Malcolm Gladwell? I have not read it, but my piecemeal knowledge suggests that this is what it is about….it’s on the list, on the long long list….
So, book covers are the body language of books. Perhaps. Do they affect the content? Maybe. I remember as a teenager reading my first book by Susan Hill, well, yes, the only other one by her I have read. It was Mrs De Winter, the sequel to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and I had to read it for a GCSE English Literature essay comparing the two. I remember really enjoying it, but now, when I think about it, apart from the flowing style all I remember is how sophisticated the book seemed to me, how grown-up. It was a paperback copy with a black cover with red cursive script for the title and gold lettering for Susan Hill’s name. An adult-looking book. The font inside was smallish with decent spaces between the lines. The pages were smooth and….the only thing was that I was afraid of creasing the spine. I have my grandfather to thank for that. Dating back to the day he was staying with my parents and in a rush to move to the dining room for dinner, I carelessly placed my book down on the coffee table with the spine facing upwards and the pages splayed. He reprimanded me, and given that he was a generally quiet person, when he did speak, you took note. Books were precious and not to be damaged. Never mind the content. I do not know how old I was at the time, but I do know that the book was one about Flossie Teacake by Hunter Davies. I was not even that fond of Flossie.
Talking of books and covers, I was in the Chester Beatty library here in Dublin a while ago with a friend admiring all the intricate calligraphy and detailed cover designs on the many beautiful books in the collection. Sir Alfred Chester Beatty was born in New York in 1875, made a lot of money as a mining engineer and then as a mining consultant. He spent time in Cairo and in Asia collecting Persian and Asian manuscripts. In 1950 he moved to Ireland and his collection was bequeathed to a trust for the public’s benefit when he died. While I was there, I over-heard a group of people saying something to the effect of how materialistic the collection was. My friend commented that they simply had not understood. I wondered. What did they mean by it? Were they referring to Chester Beatty’s acquisitiveness in purchasing all these gold-leaf books in a language he could not understand, which were nonetheless very beautiful to look at? Why were we there looking at all these books, in incomprehensible scripts? But then, what strikes you more when you look at these books is the patience and loving discipline that has gone into creating these objects of beauty. You imagine that the material borders on the spiritual and perhaps if those other museum-goers could not see that, then their attitude was a case of pot calling kettle. It was they who only saw the material side of these books and none of the spiritual and human history that lay within and around them. The entrance exhibition to the Book of Kells in Trinity College has a lovely poem written by a monk working away in his scriptorium, which conjures up beautifully the context of how these books were produced:
I and Pangur Bán, my cat
‘Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.
Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.
‘Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way:
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.
‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.
When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!
So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.
8th Century. Translated by Robin Flower. The Old Irish is available here.
But then, confusing the material with the spiritual can also occasionally be dangerous. Another of the books displayed in the Trinity library is an old religious manuscript with water-damaged pages. Seeking good health, people would dunk this text into water and then drink it, thus giving themselves a restorative dose of lead poisoning from the pigments. They would have been better off reading the book.
Will we ever learn? Will we ever stop storing our tins of canned meat? Piling shelf after shelf with these unopened attractive-looking avatars of wisdom. I do not think so. I am sure there are many many thousands of people who could spend more than a year reading all the pristine books on their shelves at home. Dead wood. Dead words. It is sad when someone lends or suggests a book to you and instead of being delighted at the thoughtful recommendation, you inwardly sigh and add it to your long reading list of the guilty great unread. There is only so much spam your mind can handle. Even if it would ultimately turn out to be a delectable pâté instead.
