While weeding through my library, I discovered that both public and school libraries generally do not accept donations of books that are more than two or three years old. Really??? When did this happen? The librarian (media specialist as they are called today) at a local school informed me that they end up throwing out many books every year. I was appalled!
The thought came to me that America seems to be in a fraught historical moment in our relationship with our books. We are in the midst of a huge cultural shift. As reading declines in each successive generation, and as content moves increasingly into digital form, there appears to be two schools of thought toward what to do with old books. Throw them out or alter them. Over the past few years, I have been seeing more and more altered book exhibits that seem to venerate the object of the book rather than the content
At first, I was bothered greatly about the cutting, tearing, painting, gluing and other mixed-media techniques done to the books, that changes it to make something else. The immediate response I had against a threat to books was rooted deep within me. When I was a child, if my mother saw me writing in a book, bending the page, or treating it carelessly, she would scold, “Never do that to a book! But then the artist in me appreciates the creativity infused in these altered books. What is it about a book that makes it a respected object and not just an information-delivery system?
I grew up in a house filled with books. My parents, especially my father was an avid and eclectic reader . My mother wrote poetry, she loved arranging and rearranging words until they rubbed up against each other in beautiful ways. She dabbled in collage using letters. Her works had a layered symphonic quality to them. My parents surrounded themselves with a variety of people who would drop in at our home to give me books, talk about ideas found in books, art, popular culture, philosophy, life, the universe and everything in between, and I was always delighted by their eccentricities- it was a kind of poetry in life.
When I was young, every Wednesday after dinner, my father would take me to the Toledo Heights Library, a beautiful high -gabled English Tudor building where the books nestled in mahogany shelves. We would get lost there for hours and wind up checking out the limit. The library formed a pretty essential part of my family's culture and lore.We were all addicted, flashlight-under-the-covers readers. Getting your own library card--and riding your bike to the library on your own--was a significant rite of passage.(A fair amount of library fines were a predictable part of my allowance too.)
Books were valued for their words and ideas, we did not cut, destroy or paint over books. They certainly were not sacred, but they were respected. It seems that as our culture values and needs books less for what they really are, we fetishize their form even more. My question is "What is the place of a bound book or an altered book in a reading society?"
