Hello everyone, I was just going to do some reading tonight when a little bit of news sent me into a flurry of nerd rage. The Barnes and Noble at the Westside Pavilion on the corner of Pico and Westwood (to which I had applied to a BILLION times) is closing. Although I was a bit mad at them for NEVER CALLING ME FOR AN INTERVIEW, I am greatly saddened to see it go.
Now I acknowledge that what follows is nothing eloquent by any means and nothing that has any real proof supporting the claims for all you technical arguing kill-joys. This is simply a call to why I love books. I know it’s a bit ironic that this blog post is being read on a screen, but oh well.
I love books, and although I might not read all the fucking time, I still love holding them. Everyone rushes out to get these e-readers, these Nooks and Kindles, and buys books to download. What the fuck? You gotta have REAL book in your hands. You gotta feel it flip through the pages and hear the “ftt-ftt-ftt” sound. You have to get a book brand new and crack it when you get to the middle, no matter how much you may hate the white crease-lines that come across the spine. You gotta open up a familiar book and ask yourself why it still smells funny, or why a certain series of books smells a certain way, but different than all other books. You gotta throw off the dust jacket of a hardback and put it around another book so it doesn’t get all warped and messed up.
And if you have your brick-sized paperback copy of “The Lord of the Rings” in your backpack, taking up too much space, fucking deal with it because you love stories and love the printed word. I’ll admit that “Wizard’s First Rule” was so thick the paperback nearly broke my thumbs why just trying to keep it open, but I loved that, damn it. And sure it’s inconvienent to carry your nearly 1,000 page hardback of “Wise Man’s Fear” on the bus, but as I said earlier, deal with it. And don’t forget the feeling of how heavy books are when you put them in a box together. Books are supposed to be heavy. You shouldn’t be able to carry 6, 000 books in something that weighs less than a pound.
Take a big papaerback make it crack as you move it. Close a large hardback and have it sound like someone’s knocking on your door. Put your ear to a paperback and flip the pages and feel the air hit your face. Enjoy a new book, and observe how the pages go from clean to dirty as your fingers smudge each page as your bookmark moves from front to back. And when your done with a book, flip that last page, close it up, and look at the back cover. Place them on your shelf and admire all the different covers, colors, lettering, height and width. Look at the artwork scattered across the front and back. Hold them in your hand, and smile to yourself that it has no batteries and will never have to charge, ever. Smile at the fact that you can share it with someone else, passing it among friends until you’ve all read it. Be confident that even if you get it wet, it will dry out, perhaps a bit wavier than last time, but will still be readable. Be confident that you could drop it, even from 100 feet in the air, and it’d be fine. Fuck, we could even run it over with a car. Might be a little dinged up, but it we could still read it.
I don’t know what I was trying to accomplish with this rant. Nothing, really. It’s nothing more of an outcry by a fan of hard-copies in a for a dying world of hard-copies and closing stores. I don’t really know how to end this. I’ve said my point, my opinions, and that is that.
Bye,
Love,
Lover of books,
Rammfan518
Here-here! Some may talk about making books more accessible in an electronic format, but there’s nothing like accessing a story by flipping one page at a time. I’m with you!