p u l p i t k at h r y n hughe s
The Sense of a Binding
The evaporation of print over the past five years has left many people feeling swimmy. It’s as if the letters themselves had shaken loose from the page, hovered for a moment and then dissolved into the ether. In the new age of e-reading, text has come to feel so insubstantial that it ’s as if a light breeze – or a click of the wrong button – might send it scurrying. The Victorians liked to think of the spirit world in terms of ectoplasm, a wispy, chiffony ribbon that wound its way around table legs and along mantelpieces giving a hint of departed dear ones. And that, I imagine, is how Kindle refusniks see electronic text in this frightening new virtual world – as a spectral echo of its once solid self.
Which is why, of course, the pendulum has swung back the other way. Recently publishers have been straining to emphasise the materiality – the scratch-and-sniff solidity – of their books. Beautiful covers, silk bookmarks and thick creamy paper have all become par for the course, at least when it comes to lead titles: mid-listers can still look forward to derivative cover designs and toilet-paper pages.
This tipping point was dramatised most obviously 18 months ago when Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending. In his acceptance speech the novelist thanked his editor and agent before paying warm and unexpected tribute to Suzanne Dean, ‘the best book designer in town’, who had turned his prize-winning novel into a ‘beautiful thing’. And you can see what he meant: The Sense of an Ending comes wrapped in a lovely cover, designed around the image of dandelion clocks. The masterstroke, though, is the way that the edges of the novel’s pages are stained black to match the mood of mourning.
By deciding to invest so heavily in the design of Barnes’s book – black borders don’t come cheap – publishers Random House were banking on a trend that had been apparent for several years. For if you had happened to pop into a bookshop in 2005 you might have been forgiven for imagining that the year was actually 1935. Books with titles like The Dangerous Book for Boys boasted proper cloth covers with embossed and impressed designs that cost a lot but made them perfect for the gift market. Suddenly the retro look was everywhere: even literary novels now arrived in the kind of covers that made you feel that you should be reading them in a Kardomah Café while waiting for Celia Johnson to join you for high tea. Meanwhile Persephone, the independent publisher that reprints women’s classics of the mid-20th century, continued to wrap its books in beautiful endpapers sourced from contemporary designs.
Another way that publishers were able to exploit this longing for a past of solid and stable forms was by trawling their own archive. Faber & Faber brought out Eighty Years of Book Cover Design, which allowed readers to re-experience classic covers by designers including Edward Bawden and Gwen Raverat. Penguin, meanwhile, did something similar with Penguin by Design: A Cover Story, which celebrated such classic book designs as that for Pevsner’s Buildings of England series, not to mention P S Farago’s Free Electron Physics.
This was blissful, of course. But since that mid-decade moment a steady stream of commentators has been urging us to think more carefully about what is really at stake when we give up the book in its material form. Ian Sansom’s Paper: An Elegy is a stern reminder that, even in this digital age, our world is pretty much built of paper: ‘it enables and represents the best of us, and the worst’. Simon Garfield’s Just My Type is a playful meditation on the different characteristics embedded in particular fonts: can adopting Cochin make you appear more elegant? Is Times New Roman just for squares? Philip Hensher’s The Missing Ink, meanwhile, gets everyone thinking about the moral qualities of an uncrossed ‘t ’ and whether learning italics turns you into an arse (his word, not mine).
Most recently, Rick Gekoski’s Lost, Stolen or Shredded explores those many occasions in history when a manuscript has gone missing, whether on purpose or by chance. Think of Philip Larkin’s incriminating diaries or Kafka’s manuscripts. Although he doesn’t say so exactly, Gekoski’s narrative is counterpointed by the oppressive knowledge that, these days, no bit of writing can ever vanish, even though we might wish to consign it to oblivion. E-text may appear insubstantial, but it is stubborn stuff, infinitely reclaimable from ‘the cloud’, that notional storage depot where everything gets stored.
All these books, the plainly nostalgic ones and those that aim to make us think a bit more rigorously about that nostalgia, do, however, depend upon the view – paradoxically rather hazy itself – that books used to be something you could rely on. They never changed their physical being at will and their reassuring solidity meant that you could always rely on them to do little jobs around the house – propping up wobbly chairs or providing an extra notepad by the telephone.
In fact, this is a sentimental fallacy. Any professional book scholar will tell you it has always been impossible to make books stay in one place. In the mid-19th century, new technologies and a newly literate working class resulted in a flood of cheap identikit books, made of tissue paper and cheap card. A lack of copyright law meant that content was routinely ‘re-purposed’, cut and pasted into entirely new productions. By the 20th century, copyright had got tougher, but a popular book could still be reprinted with almost infinite variations of cover, preface and illustrations.
Does that mean, then, that anyone who likes to run a loving finger over a particularly fine bit of calf binding or go searching at the weekend for first editions in Cotswold bookshops is in the grip of a regressive fantasy? Surely not. The heart wants what the heart wants and, for many of us, that is still thick deckle paper rather than the eerie backlight of an e-reader. But please let ’s not divide ourselves up into defensive tribes, glaring crossly at each other. What we will see over the next few years is an evolving dance between the two ‘platforms’. Online reading will evolve to incorporate many of the pleasures of realworld reading. r j u n e 2 0 1 3 | Literary Review 1
