On Book Covers and Book Love

Every now and then, my sister and I will meet up at the bookshop on a weekday and take a bit of time away from curating and shelving books to talk about what we’ve been reading.

We spend time browsing the bookshelves, and picking our next reads. We know the titles that we’ve ordered and shelved, and most of the books we get for the shop, we want to read, but that’s different from deciding which specific book to pick up next.

It’s nice to take a step back and look at the bookshelves as readers, and see what catches our attention. This week, it was books about books, for me. I picked up An Inky parade by Pradeep Sebastian and Every Day I Read by Hwang Bo-Reum. Two books that are beautifully made, a joy to look at, hold and handle, even before I read them.

One of the many pleasures of reading a physical book is visual. It’s such a joy to see a book cover that is just right for the book it holds inside.

I can be a bit nutty about cover art. I’ve bought two copies of the same book on more than one occasion because I wanted a particular book cover. It’s the same book inside, but it’s nicer when it comes in the right package. Three years of being a bookseller have shown me that I’m not alone in this.

There’s a tactile pleasure in a physical book as well, the weight and the heft of it, the feel of the pages, and of course, the smell of paper and ink.

Anne Fadiman has an essay her book Ex Libris (another wonderful book about books) where she writes about the two different kinds of book love, what she calls courtly love and carnal love. Courtly love involves caring not just for the content of the book but the body of it as well, loving the book as a physical object.

Carnal lovers of books, of which she is one, don’t think twice before putting a book face down, bending the spine, folding the corners of pages, or shoving a book thoughtlessly at the bottom of a bag, because what’s sacred to them is the content not the form.

Me, I’m a courtly lover. I love books as physical objects as much as I love them for all the stories, adventures, ideas, and opinions they hold.