Fantastic Metropolis

Intro · Likes · Rituals · Necessity
Examples · Memories · Bios

Brian Evenson

I like the tangibility of it, the way in which the pages turn, the quality of the binding and the paper. I love in particular a well-made hardback book that falls open nicely and stays open—something harder and harder to find in the U.S. I like as well the portability of it, that I can take a book anywhere, that I can read it sitting on the couch or walking down the street.

Tim Feeney

Its vulnerability. Paper rips, bindings break. You have to respect a book’s fragility or you’ll damage it. People who seriously value books as objects can be spotted a mile away: they feel the paper in a way that suggests it’s more than merely tactile; they cradle the spine of the book in their hand as if they were holding a baby.

Jeffrey Ford

What I like most about it is that, although its message may change in the reader’s mind, its language and layout never do. With the onset of the Internet and computing, texts are now changeable. The language of a story or essay can be altered from one moment to the next. With the government demanding more and more control over the Internet, I fear that texts critical of it could be changed by it, and who accesses that text can also be known. A book is a subversive object—easily hidden, secretly passed, its language unchanging.

Karen Joy Fowler

Mostly I like the ease with which I can go forwards and backwards in it. When trying to relocate a particular quote I have a good memory not for which page I read it on, but for which quadrant of the page it was on, so I flip back through all the left-hand corners (for example) until I find the left-hand corner I want.

Neil Gaiman

The smell of paper, the way the book feels, the look of it, the heft.

Stephen Gallagher

I’m a sucker for those Edwardian hardbacks with printed cover boards and clear, well-spaced type. These were not disposable objects.

Theodora Goss

A difficult question to answer, because I like a different thing about every book I own. (To the extent one owns books. I suspect that if we asked the books themselves, they would describe a process of circulation, through shelves of dusty bookstores, piles on the floors of graduate student apartments, library carrels.) About Ruskin’s Works in twenty-two volumes: their solid procession of crimson and gilding, so satisfying on the shelf. About Howard’s End, in a torn green cover from the seventies: that I can leave it open on my bedside table, the way you should never do because it cracks the spine, until I’m once again feeling complicated and melancholy. About The Blue Fairy Book: that on the embossed cover, two frogs are talking and a fairy is holding strings that are tied to bees. No story in the book corresponds to that cover. One has to write one’s own.

M. John Harrison

I can take books or leave them as physical objects. A small one is easier to get in your pocket.

Barry Hughart

I was very, very young, being read to by my just-reading older sister, when all of a sudden the letters beneath her moving finger began to make sense. Later I tried the magic all by myself, and discovered (with some exaggeration) that I could read! This revelation was truly momentous, a secret I both gloried in and feared, and a couple of months passed before I got the nerve to share it with anyone. Except, of course, the book. We were in this together. I carried it, slept with it—the Book, the wisest, strongest, best, and most reliable friend I have ever had.

Rhys Hughes

Maybe just the idea of the book is nearly enough. The imaginary books in the Borges’ story “The Library of Babel” still excite me and they are certainly not physical objects.