Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (24 page)

In my house—a house in which one book-filled room is rather grandiosely called “the library,” and in which various kinds of bound books have spilled over into four other rooms and the basement—fifty percent of the current inhabitants have already gone over to the dark side. My husband will no longer read a book printed on paper. An early adopter of all new technologies (“Inspector Gadget,” we used to call him, after a cartoon character who was prominent during my son’s childhood), my husband will only read what he can obtain on his Kindle or his iPad. If I have bought a new mystery and recommend it to him when I am done, he will not read the free book that is lying around our house. Instead, he will spend the additional $9.99 or $12.99 that it costs to get it digitally, and if it is not yet available in digital format, he will read something else in its place. Granted, he is always happy when I can recommend an old, out-of-copyright book that he can download at no cost, but that may be as much because he prefers nineteenth-century novels as because he is inherently thrifty. In any case, his affection for the paperless book is now matched by his explicit distaste for the heavy, dusty, un-self-illuminating bound version. He has become like one of those people in Gary Shteyngart’s futuristic
Super Sad True Love Story
—people who think that actual books smell bad.

I, on the other hand, think they smell wonderful. Sometimes, when I have ordered an old book on the internet and it finally arrives in the mail, and after I have thrown away the packaging and poured myself a drink and sat down in my favorite chair, I open the cover and sniff the pages before I even start to read. I always think the smell of that paper goes with its feel, the tangible sensation of a thick, textured, easily turnable page on which the embedded black print
looks
as if it could be felt with a fingertip, even when it can’t.

Okay, so I’m a fetishist. But I am not the kind of fetishist who routinely haunts antiquarian bookstores and spends hundreds or even thousands of dollars on first editions and other hard-to-get volumes. I don’t care
that
much about the book as physical object, and in fact I’m somewhat opposed to its being valued excessively as a form of concrete art. One of the great things about books, I’ve always thought, is that they are mass-produced, so there isn’t any such thing as the “original” one. The writer, unlike the painter or sculptor, can both keep his work and give it away, and my copy will be just as good as his, or yours. I like the egalitarian aspect of the printed book as work of art.

The digital book is also egalitarian, in its way, but as a work of art it lacks solidity. I’m not just talking about a printed book’s heft or weight (which, I’ll admit, can also be a disadvantage, to weak wrists or weary packers), but, more important, the way its print stays put on the page. When you read a digital book, the words can change size and reflow at the touch of a button. Page numbering, left-and-right layout, space breaks, type design—all this means nothing on an electronic reader, or means only something temporary, something to be manipulated by the Reader of the reader. Length and placement become infinitely malleable. A Victorian novel that is 875 pages long on my iPad becomes 2,933 pages on my iPhone; if I enlarge the type one size, those numbers become 1,030 and 3,647, respectively. If I then change the font from, say, Palatino to Cochin, the corresponding numbers go up again, to 1,284 and 3,995 (plus the whole reading experience may alter, either slightly or hugely, depending on what kinds of prior associations I have with those different typefaces).

What this means, in practice, is that someone who remembers specific passages in the spatial way I do—as in “I think it was on the left-hand side of the page, not more than two or three pages before a chapter break”—becomes lost in the amorphous, ever-varying sea of the digital page. Oh, sure, I can perform a word or phrase search using that little Sherlock Holmes–like magnifying glass, and eventually it will probably take me to my desired passage. This is immensely useful if you are away from home. But it feels like cheating to me; or rather, what it actually feels is
external
, as if something else (not I, not the Reader herself) is doing the remembering. So the process is not, for me, the same as leafing through the book I take off my own shelves, the exact book in which I first read that passage and through which it imprinted itself on me. That, I suppose, is the main reason why
this
entire book had to be written at home, in the place where almost all my books dwell, and not in the various other locations where I spend, hourly or seasonally, a good bit of time.

I do read, though, on both my iPad and my iPhone. Most of the mysteries I read these days are purchased in digital form, if they are available that way. When you want a mystery, especially a sequel to a mystery, you generally want it
right now
, and the e-book versions, with their near-instantaneous materialization on your tablet or e-reader, are designed to supply this kind of gratification. There is also something about the swish of a finger on a glassy surface, the sudden flip of the visual screen, that seems the perfect way of turning the page on a page-turner. One zooms through the book, mentally and actually. It is annoying that you can’t then lend out or give away these newly finished mysteries, as I am in the habit of doing with my bound books, but I assume this is a technical glitch that will someday be resolved. For the moment, it is a difficulty that is more than made up for by the ease of acquiring and carrying around these often disposable novels. Recently I filled a whole ten-day period of foreign travel with the three collected volumes of Michael Connelly’s excellent Harry Bosch mysteries, stored up on my iPad and waiting for me every time I had a spare moment to read. I like Harry Bosch just fine, but I don’t plan on reading these novels again anytime soon, so it was with no compunction that I edited them off my screen once I was done.

I am also a great fan of Project Gutenberg and all its copyright-free nineteenth-century novels. If you wanted to read a bunch of thrillers but didn’t feel like paying for Michael Connelly, you could just download thirty or forty Wilkie Collins mysteries. Gutenberg books tend to be slightly typo-addled, and there are occasional format problems at chapter and section breaks, but these are minor quibbles when the price and availability are so right. Writers I have spent a fortune acquiring in obscure hardcover editions—William Dean Howells, for instance, who for a long time was barely reprinted anywhere—can now be readily obtained at no cost whatsoever. And the books are eminently readable in this form. Surprisingly, I find that even Henry James works well in his digital manifestation. The last time I read
The Wings of the Dove
, it was mainly on my iPhone, as I commuted back and forth by subway or sat in a café. I don’t recommend this for first-time readers of James: you might have a hard time keeping track of the sentence, much less the whole plot, on the phone’s small screen. But if you already have an overall sense of where the novel is going, this is not a bad way to reconnect with its detailed pleasures.

In fact, the Victorian novel I mentioned a few paragraphs back, the one that grows from 875 to 2,933 pages when it moves from tablet to phone, is James’s
The Tragic Muse
. I downloaded it from Gutenberg to both devices as I was preparing to read it again. The opening pages, though, gave no indication about whether this was the early version, which James wrote when he was in his forties, or the late-style rewrite, which he produced for the definitive New York Edition twenty years later. Though I like both versions well enough, not knowing which one I was reading gave me slight qualms. So I went to my own shelves and plucked off my Penguin Modern Classics paperback, which contained a helpful “Note on the Text.” The three-paragraph note briefly explained the history of the rewrite, gave two small examples of its effects on this novel’s style, and then announced: “Either text was equally available for this edition; after comparing them, the publishers have deliberately chosen that of the first edition (Macmillan 1890) on grounds of taste.” On grounds of taste! When was the last time you read that in an unsigned scholarly note? I was so moved and persuaded by this commendable audacity that I instantly plunged into the Penguin, leaving my digital downloads untouched.

Digital editions are certainly not the only ones to suffer from editorial shortcomings. That can happen in bound books, too. Sometimes the omissions are all too purposeful, resulting from publishing-house economics which dictate that a multivolume work is too expensive to print and that only a single-volume abridged edition will do. This is a problem that digitalization, with its elimination of paper, ink, and bindings—with its elimination, in a way, of the whole idea of length—would seem perfectly designed to solve. Unfortunately, you can’t yet count on getting everything you want digitally, and I often feel that the choice about what to put online has been made with extreme arbitrariness. Why, for instance, can I download all the volumes of Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs and none of those by a much better writer, Alexander Herzen?

The Herzen autobiography,
My Past and Thoughts
, offered the occasion for one of my more extreme encounters with both the dangers and the rewards of seeking out a print edition. I can no longer remember how I first heard about the book—as a throwaway reference, I think, in a review on some other topic entirely, but such an interesting reference that I felt obliged to follow it up. I checked Project Gutenberg first: no Herzen. Then, because there are no actual bookstores in my vicinity anymore (the last two, Cody’s and Black Oak Books, disappeared about a decade ago), I resorted to the various sites that sell printed books via the internet. The only version of
My Past and Thoughts
that clearly fell within my budget was a paperback edition published by the University of California Press and edited by Dwight Macdonald. Fine, I thought: nice left-wing credentials, excellent scholarly reputation, no problem. So I ordered the paperback.

When it arrived, though, it turned out to be an abridged edition. Not knowing Herzen yet, I thought perhaps I could live with this. After all, a nine-hundred-page abridgement is still a big book. But I got a bad feeling about the editorial process when I read in Macdonald’s preface that he had “regretfully” been forced to cut a long section from Volume Two called “A Family Drama.” This was Herzen’s own title for his agonized, self-examining, often frenzied account of an affair between his much-loved wife (she is actually one of the two intimates to whom he at times addresses the memoirs) and a close friend of his. I would not have thought this was the kind of thing that any editor in his right mind would cut for space-saving reasons. Still, I persisted with the Macdonald edition. And then, as I was closing in on the end of a youthful section called “Prison and Exile,” I came across the following footnote:

At this point Herzen begins the story of his wife, Natalie—his first cousin and, like him, the illegitimate child of a wealthy aristocrat: her solitary and unhappy childhood, their courtship and early married life. It takes up the last hundred pages of the first volume. They are omitted here—as are the last one hundred and seventy pages of the second volume, about their tragic later married life (“A Family Drama”)—for reasons of theme and space as explained in the Preface. (D.M.)

At that point I threw the book on the floor. Really, I did. Then I picked it up and mailed it to my son (who is intensely interested in politics and history, and wouldn’t mind as much as I did about the missing marital story), and got back online to search for the complete version.

I had learned enough from Dwight Macdonald’s preface to know that the edition I wanted was the four-volume set published in 1968 by Chatto & Windus in England and Alfred A. Knopf in America. Based on Constance Garnett’s original six-volume translation, this edition had been updated by Humphrey Higgens, who added a number of useful footnotes from various authoritative Russian editions as well as new Herzen material he’d dug up on his own. Most of the copies for sale on the internet were either incomplete (“Vol. 1 only”) or ridiculously expensive. At last, however, I found what seemed to be the whole thing, offered by the Friends of Webster Groves Public Library for the very reasonable price of fifty dollars. I clicked on that one, inserting a long comment about which edition I was seeking and asking that the sale not go through until this had been verified. Since the order was placed on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, I assumed I wouldn’t hear anything more until business reopened on Tuesday.

But that Monday, on the holiday itself, I got a response from someone named Ann. Thus began a brief but satisfying epistolary love affair between me and the Friends of Webster Groves Public Library. (I still have no idea where Webster Groves is. It sounds like something Thornton Wilder would have made up, and I prefer to keep it that way.) In that first note, Ann informed me that she thought the one they had was the four-volume edition, but she couldn’t be sure until she checked it on Tuesday. I thanked her and wished her a happy Memorial Day. A few hours later, still on the holiday, I got another email:

Hi, Wendy. I was able to get to our book storage area and did find the 4 volume set of Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts translated by Constance Garnett with revisions by H. Higgens. This is exactly as you described. It appears no one used these books, they are in excellent condition. I did notice the previous owner wrote her name on the inside front page. The cardboard case that comes with this set does have a tear down one side and it looks like one edge was hit against something and it has an indentation in the corner. The books are not affected. I brought this set home with me and can mail these to you tomorrow after I hear from you. Happy Memorial Day to you too. Ann Friends of Webster Groves Public Library.

Some of the pleasure I got from reading this book—which I did in full immediately after it arrived, and then again, in sections, over the years since—came from the warmth of that transaction. As I told Ann, I really
like
to own books that have the previous owner’s signature in them, much as I enjoy living in a Victorian house, where the habits and tastes of its earlier residents are still discernible in places. And the edition itself was even lovelier than I had expected: the margins were generously wide, the pages were the beautiful thick kind, and the otherwise identical dust jackets were printed in four different colors. The volumes looked—and still look—marvelously substantial, sitting there in their yellow slipcase on my bookshelf, with the four black Borzois bounding across their spines. They could almost make one believe that books will last forever.