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Sarebear's Sentral Spot Library
Quick Clicks:
Christianity
and Inspiration
Philosophy
Humor
General Good Books
Children's Books
"And so, in the face of the future, I must sing the song of the book, for nothing more voluptuous do I know than sitting with bright pictures, fat upon my lap, and turning glossy pages of giraffes and Gauguins, penguins and pyramids. I love wide atlases delineating the rise and fall of empires, the trade route from Kashmir to Samarkand.
"I love heavy dictionaries, their tiny pictures, complicated columns, minute definitions of incarnative and laniary, hagboat and flapdoodle. I love the texture of the pages, the high-gloss slickness of magazines as slippery as coiled eels, the soft nubble of old books, delicate India paper, so thin my hands tremble to turn the fluttering dry leaves, and the yellow cheap coarse paper of mystery novels so gripping I don't care that the plane circles Atlanta forever, because it is a full moon and I am stalking in the Arizona desert a malevolent shape-shifter.
"I love the feel of ink on the paper, the shiny varnishes, the silky lacquers, the satiny mattes. I love the press of letter in thick paper, the roughness sizzles my fingers with centuries of craft embedded in pulped old rags, my hands caress the leather of old bindings crumbling like ancient gentlemen. The books I hold for their heft, to riff their pages, to smell their smoky dustiness, the rise of time in my nostrils.
"I love bookstores, a perfect madness of opportunity, a lavish feast eaten by walking up aisles, and as fast as my hand reaches out, I reveal books' intimate innards, a doleful engraving of Charlotte Corday, who murdered Marat, a drawing of the 1914 T-head Stutz Bearcat, whose owners shouted at rivals, 'There never was a car worser than the Mercer.'
"I sing these pleasures of white paper and black ink, of the small jab of the hard-cover corner at the edge of my diaphragm, of the look of type, of the flip of a page, the sinful abandon of the turned-down corner, the reckless possessiveness of my marginal scrawl, the cover picture - as much a part of the book as the contents itself, like Holden Caulfield with his red cap turned backwards, staring away from us, at what we all thought should become.
"And I also love those great
fat Bibles evangelists wave like otter pelts, the long graying sets of
unreadable authors, the tall books of babyhood enthusiastically crayoned,
the embossed covers of adolescence, the tiny poetry anthologies you could
slip in your pocket, and the yellowing cookbooks of recipes for glace
blanche Dupont and Argentina mocha toast, their stains and spots souvenirs
of long evenings full of love and argument, and the talk, like as not,
of books, books, books."
-- Jerome Stern; Radios
(More to come...)
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