Thinking about books

One of the many joys of my job is getting to talk to interesting people, and to have the chance to ask them the sorts of questions that would be rude in almost any other context.

It’s great to be able to talk to people who love what they do; usually that sort of passion is communicable, at least for the length of the conversation.

This week, I got to talk to Dr. Noam Sienna, who is deeply in love with both his subject — the books of Jews who lived in the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, and what those books tells us about those Jews — and with books themselves.

Rutgers Initiative for the Book is a university-wide interdisciplinary look at books as physical objects. It looks at books not just as a neutral home for words and ideas but as a human-made creation, of a particular size and shape and weight, filled with one out of very many kinds of paper, with pages that are cut and bound.

Books are marvelous objects, when you look at them for themselves. There are so many words jammed into such a small space! How brilliant the leap from a scroll to pages was.

There are many advantages to reading on a screen. We renegade book-lovers often are scolded about killing trees, and that criticism is true. Books are largely made of paper, and paper comes from dead trees. Guilty.

Reading on-screen does make a person not have to face the always looming question — what are you going to do with all those books? No matter how many bookshelves you have, it’s possible to run out of space on them; storing them in the oven and never cooking again isn’t a particularly good idea. And it’s also true that physical books don’t come with their own built-in lights.

But there’s nothing like cracking open a book stiff with newness, of knowing how far into it you are — and therefore how much space the plot has to move forward before it has to resolve — just by seeing where in it you are. There’s nothing like cover art and blurbs, and certainly there’s nothing like being able to know where on a page a word is, and where in the book that page is.

There’s nothing like learning how to turn the pages of the Times — some of us are old enough to be able to remember watching with awe as grown-ups who were seasoned commuters showed us how to fold each page in on itself as they sat on a train, turning newsprint into origami.

Progress is great — one iPad can hold as many books as a floor-to-ceiling shelf — but so is physicality.

Thanks, Rutgers, for the memories.

—JP