The book as furniture. Shelved rows of books warm and brighten the starkest room, and scattered single volumes reveal mental processes in progress, books in the act of consumption, abandoned but readily resumable, tomorrow or next year. By bedside and easy chair, books promise a cozy, swift and silent release from this world into another, with no current involved but the free and scarcely detectable crackle of brain cells. For ease of access and speed of storage, books are tough to beat.
The book as sensual pleasure. Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket or flexible paperback. The weight can rest on the little finger of the right hand for hours without noticeable strain, while the thumb of that hand holds the pages open and fingers of the other hand turn them. The rectangular block of type, a product of five and a half centuries of printers' lore, yields to decipherment so gently that one is scarcely aware of the difference between immersing oneself in an imaginary world and scanning the furniture of one's own room.
In these last, troubled decades of the book's existence, the need to ''present'' impressively in bookstores has led to inflated volumes, with a page and type bigger than organically ideal, and with a painful strain on the above-mentioned little finger. The paper shortages of World War II rattled, it may be, the aesthetic confidence of book manufacturers; it is the books of the 1920's and 30's that are most inviting, with their handy size, generous margins and sharp letterpress type. Still, even an indifferently designed book feels like a better companion in bed than a humming, wire-trailing laptop.
The book as souvenir. One's collection comes to symbolize the contents of one's mind. Books read in childhood, in yearning adolescence, at college and in the first self-conscious years of adulthood travel along, often, with readers as they move from house to house. My mother's college texts, I remember, sat untouched in a corner of our country bookcase, radiating the satisfactions of Renaissance poetry and Greek drama while being slowly hollowed by silverfish. The bulk of my own college books are still with me, rarely consulted but always there, reminders of moments, of stages, in a pilgrimage. The decades since add their own drifts and strata of volumes read or half-read or intended to be read. Books preserve, daintily, the redolence of their first reading -- this beach, that apartment, that attack of croup, this flight to Indonesia. Without their physical evidence my life would be more phantasmal; as is, they are stacked around me, towering even over my head, as not only an extension into my past, sinking their foundations securely down to my accreted jejune marginal comments, but reaching up into clouds of noble intention -- books waiting to be read, heavy as grapes unharvested and musky, years of dust to be blown off in a second of sudden plucking, their moment to be seized and absorbed come triumphantly round at last. Such books constitute a pledge of an infinite future, just as their brothers, already read but mostly forgotten, form an infinite resource of potential rereading, of new angles and insights on terrain where our footprints have all but vanished. Books externalize our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.
――John Updike “A Case for Books” from Due Considerations
