The Physicality of Books
What do you most like about the book as a physical object?
Intro · Likes · Rituals · Necessity
Examples · Memories · Bios
Forrest Aguirre
Its heft and its feel. I tend to like heavy books that have some texture. I like to touch embossments and stipling on older books, particularly. Running my fingers over 100 year old books is particularly exhilarating, as I wonder whose finger oils will now mingle with mine to slowly decay the pages.
Hawk Alfredson
Books are soft enough to read in bed.
Neal Asher
After years of reading pleasure, my love of books is so deeply embedded in my psyche that it would be difficult to find all its roots. I suppose it could be comparable to a terminal nicotine addict’s love of an unopened packet of cigarettes. As opposed to other mediums… you can read [books] on the crapper.
Dale Bailey
I love the pristine condition of a new book—the tight binding, the clean pages, the unfrayed dust jacket, the sense of possibility, of new worlds waiting to be discovered.
R. M. Berry
That it does not start or end where it starts or ends. There’s something strange about the fact that the material object (the book) is not identical with the composition (the book).
K. J. Bishop
Its portability. Though there’s also an undeniable charm about huge, heavy old tomes that can hardly be lifted, much less popped into a handbag for reading on the train. The book, I think, adds a little bit of excess meaning to a text; there’s symbology and mythology in the book’s physical form. As physical objects, my favorite books are the kind with very fancy bindings—embossed leather, gilding, metal corners, the kind of books that look like they’re made out of pimps’ shoes—but I can’t afford to collect them: I just stand with my nose pressed against antiquarian bookshop windows. My favorite books, as sensual objects, are the deluxe books in Des Esseintes’ library. I’m grateful to Huysmans for describing them, as the description is so vivid that the books take definite shape in my mind, and in that sense I own them, without having to pay for them!
Richard Bleiler
I like its solidity, the tactile contrasts between the glabrous feel of the dust wrapper and the slightly rougher feel of the paper. I like the contrasts of colors between the two. I like the smell, the weight, the typography. I like the occasional imperfections in paper and binding and layout. I like the feel of the text block and the way some books have deckled edges and others have uncut pages and still others are gilt; and old gilt edged books, ones in which the gilt has faded to a shabby gentility, are lovely. As are colored end pages and sewn caps and calf skin bindings and books with boards.
Jonathan Carroll
Its weight and smell—the fact it is a substantial physical object in your hand.
Jay Caselberg
It has weight and substantiality, a feel that you know is there and present as the words are.
Michael Chabon
When it is old, its odor. The way certain favorite books fit into the hip pocket of certain favorite jackets. The way a book can serve as a repository for a photograph, a ticket stub, a feather or a leaf.
Michael Cisco
It is silent. Patient. It waits for me to animate it, and to animate me in turn. This patience and quietness are related, and both in turn related to the book’s relationship to time. Real books are created to endure for the benefit of unborn persons, like time capsules. They act as silent witnesses, whose testimony is immediately available.
Brendan Connell
I like to have my walls lined with books; see them piled up in artistic disorder on my desk, on the floor. (I hate to see their pages folded, written on, or defaced.)
John Coulthart
A small object but immensely powerful. It can be the repository for complete trivia or for ideas that change the world. It can hold an entire universe between its covers.
