Happy holidays, fellow book studies travellers! We in the BAPS program hope it was magical and awesome (or at least relaxing). This was supposed to be a short post, but book nerds tend to nerd out.
Over Christmas, I had a friend visiting from São Paulo who used to work at a bookshop there. We were talking about this Book Studies class (book nerds of the world, unite!) and she was talking about the different things that went on in this bookstore, the different things people bought, and the ways they bought them.
First, she told me about a specific customer. Every month, the different workers at the bookshop would compile a list of thirty books, using published bestseller lists, the shop’s bestseller list, their own preferences, and word of mouth of various genres, fiction and non-fiction. They would put these books into a box for this customer, who would then buy these thirty books. Every month. Thirty books. Apparently he told my friend that he had a separate apartment for all of these books, he never read them; he only kept them. She figured he couldn’t have read them, unless he was a freakishly fast reader. He never let people borrow them, and apparently didn’t even break the spines. He seemed to be building a person library of un-used, unopened books.
This first story left me with a lot of questions:
Why buy books that you will not or could not read?
What is the point of warehousing books in such a way?
What were they for?
Was he actually building a library of recommendations from this bookshop? Why?
What will happen to these books when he dies? Who will get them? Will anyone?
If you can afford to buy all these books monthly, why not make them available to those who are reading them?
While this story left me plotting a way to learn Portuguese, get to Brazil, and break into this flat, there was another thing she told me about. One of the services this bookshop offered was selling books by the meter. Customers who were decorating their homes or real estate agents who were staging homes would request a certain length of books, sometimes with a specific colour, size, or theme in mind. These books could also be used for TV, film, or commercials. These were all actual text-filled books. They were just decorative, set pieces for someone’s home or potential home.
I wonder if they ever read them, considering they are decoration. Anyone who’s ever been in a house with a lot of decorative pillows knows those are NOT for sleeping on. When the house is finally sold, does the buyer get the books? Do they just move on to new homes?
I looked into this ‘books by the meter’ (or foot, for our friends still using imperial units). Some are a rental service; some specialise in rare and old-looking books (basically the ones that would fill Dumbledore’s office). But on my googling adventure, I found this line from an Australian company that offers this service:
“Our selections will please the eye and lend an intellectual, cultured air to any space they occupy. Books represent accumulated knowledge. Books more than furnish a room, they positively bring it to life.”
Now I’m left with more questions. While I can understand why books can be symbols used this way, what does it say when this symbol is emptied out of meaning and replaced with just the form (simulation much)? Why do we place such a heavy emphasis on the ownership of books to prove a rich intellectual legitimacy? Why is this ownership sufficient? If a book is never to be read, can we properly call it a BOOK or is there something that it loses when it will never encounter a reader? I’m not referring only to the text, but interplay between text and book. Is there a point when book-formed objects stop being what we understand as a BOOK because this function is taken away? Or is decoration part of the function of books?
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