My book, let me show it to you
John Wyver writes: I have today finished reading Anthony Trollope’s 1875 tale of Victorian capitalism, class and love, The Way We Live Now. This is a wonderful chronicle of greed, perfidy and romance, crammed with compelling characters, including of course the robber baron Augustus Melmotte, but also among many others Sir Felix Carbury, Mrs Hurtle, Paul Montague, and one who I most identify with, Roger Carbury. Moreover, the resonances with today’s world of tech bros, market manipulation and Tr*mp are ever present.
But it is not Trollope’s tale that I intend to reflect on here. Rather, on this World Book Day, I want to acknowledge, just briefly, my physical paperback from the excellent Oxford World’s Classics series, and to recognise how, after more or less a month of it accompanying me in bed, at mealtimes, on tube journeys and trains, in various waiting rooms, and in a pub of two, this copy bears a precious history of our relationship.
My volume, which was new and pristine when purchased, has not been annotated by me (I save that for non-fiction volumes), and nor have I, quelle horreur, turned down the corners of pages. I have not spilled food or drink on it, and it has not been rained on or subjected to high winds. Nonetheless, simply by being opened and closed and carried and tumbled in a rucksack with other objects, it has been, modestly, marked.
The spine shows signs of having been bent back. The cover has the trace of a fold inflicted when I clumsily put the volume down on my desk. The front cover corners are moderately frayed. And the edges of the notes pages at the back are slightly discoloured because I have frequently thumbed them to check one of the useful explantory notes provided by editor Francis O’Gorman.
In a tiny way, I take delight in these traces of my reading, which would have no equivalent had I read an e-book version. I am constantly pleased to be reminded, materially, that Trollope and I have spent a great deal of time together over the past month. And although I know there are a thousand other things that distress and disturb and appall me about the world now, I would also have been upset had I at any point lost this paperback once it had begun to be marked by our time together.
‘I have always imagined,’ Jorge Luis Borges famously said, ‘that Paradise will be a kind of library.’ If that’s the case, which sad to say I rather doubt, I hope that there may be shelf space for my particular copy of The Way We Live Now.
I wish I had written this blog post.