I feel a certain sadness when I finger it. Odd, in a way, given that it is “only a book.” Such a deprecation is foolhardy, I know. As a bibliophile of long-standing I intuited early the fact that “only” is an adjective woefully small and ill-suited for the expansive, world-making power of books. Books are as vast as the soul, as expansive as the mind, and potentially as holy as the universe itself. God, after all, created by the utterance of words.
That said, it is this particular book as object that saddens me, completely unrelated to the story it tells or the world it creates.
The cause of the sadness? It has never been read. After all these years.
One from the 10th printing of its first edition in 1933, I obtained my copy recently from a used bookseller in Stanley, NY through the wonders of the internet after learning that it wasn’t available from any of our nearby libraries. For all of its pedigree It wasn’t expensive. This first edition volume cost me less than $15.
Never mind that it was a bestseller in its day.
Never mind that it was written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose popularity surpassed his contemporaries Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Never mind that multiple movies were derived from his various books.
Never mind that he socialized with the likes Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
Never mind that this particular title has influenced countless readers and set in motion an entire movement that influences and shapes us to this day.
Never mind all that. It was relatively cheap. But that isn’t the sadness. The sad fact is that this particular copy, now almost 90 years old, has never been read.
Books are written to be read. I happen to know that first hand. Born from an idea impregnated by the Muse, coaxed and nurtured through the hard labor of hours and days and anguish and imagination, a book is a swaddled love entrusted to the cosmos with the hope – the perhaps naïve certainty – that it will pass into wider imaginations and sow seeds of its own. A book is a gift, simply and forthrightly and vulnerably offered…
…for the express purpose of being read. Words, after all, are precious. Ideas, after all, are powerful. And when ideas are put into words almost anything is possible. Every copy of a book is a seed.
But sadly, this one was never planted. This copy was never read. How do I know? In the printing process, multiple “pages” are printed on a larger sheet of paper. Eventually the sheets are folded to the size of the pages, the folds are cut and the finished pages are bound. Except in my copy the last fold was never cut. Pages 344 and 345 are unreadable, imprisoned inside pages 343 and 346. A blade would be required to liberate those pages, and after all these years, over all these many decades, through however many hands have held and considered this book, no one ever has.
But now the volume has come to me, and I am reading it. And when I arrive at those final four pages I will carefully, beckoningly razor blade them apart so that those two denied pages can have their say – along with all those ignored ones before them, and that very last one that follows. Perhaps then the book, having accomplished its goal, can rest.
No, perhaps then it can finally come to life…in me.
