Books, old book shops and the demise of the culture of reading
Many years ago, one of my teachers gave me this advice: "Never argue with someone whose TV is bigger than their bookshelf". That was way before the invention of the digital "tricknologies" of mass deception---the cell phones, the tablets and their ever-proliferating soft and hard derivatives.
We grew up with many such words of wisdom offered us by our teachers and elders. "The world belongs to those who read" was one common saying. "A room without books is like a body without a soul" by the Roman orator Cicero was another. This one was a favorite of many teachers who taught me. I heard it so often that it is now etched in my mind and heart. "Books are windows onto the world; you travel the universe from the comfort of your book nook, without leaving your reading space." So true. Jefferey Archer's short story "The Hungarian Professor" as the ultimate proof of this adage comes to mind. And, so on.
One of my favorite weekend activities has always been visits to old book shops. As I roamed the world from continent to continent and from country to country for study and work purposes over a quarter of a century, I collected books from so many of these places. I can say that more than 80 percent of the books that I own now were bought at these dusty street corner joints where the sweet smell of old paper always wafts in the air .
For sure, stepping into an old book shop is less like entering a store and more like submerging oneself into a different timeline. One's sensory palette becomes alive as one steps inside the magical realm. The velvet grit of a cloth-bound spine; the way a page feels like dried skin, thin and prone to tearing with a sound like a soft exhale. Sometimes, gold-leaf lettering catching a stray sunbeam; the "foxing" (those rusty brown freckles on yellowish old paper) that looks like a map of a forgotten, ancient world. Oh, the unique smell---the pleasant aroma of a new (or any) book, caused by the gradual chemical breakdown of the compounds used within the paper and called bibliosmia. The air inside that is often thick, tasting faintly of cedarwood and the mustiness of a damp basement. The quietude inside isn't just silence, but a low hum of compressed history, stories between covers. The labyrinthine shelves and the stacks of treasure, the spines sitting on the racks, leaning into one another for support, their edges frayed like well-worn cuffs. When you pull a volume from its spot, it resists with a tiny puff of grey powder, leaving a clean, dark rectangle in the dust, as if you have just disturbed a ghost of the book.
Alas, not many of these old shops are around anymore. They are disappearing fast everywhere. Many closed doors for good years ago and the ones still around have "For Sale" or "For Rent/Lease" signs hanging on their main doors or windows. The digital screens have won; paper and ink have lost.
To watch a book shop die is to witness a slow-motion collapse of the senses. It's the loss of serendipity, the death of the wonderful accidental discovery: these old book shops were places where we went without knowing what exactly we were looking for. The digital algorithms feed us more of what we already like using what we have already given them, wittingly or otherwise, in the form of our personal "data".
For bibliophiles like us, the transition from the tactile to the digital can feel like a quiet erosion of a sanctuary. There is a specific kind of grief, a profound sadness, in watching a space built for slow contemplation---a library, a book-cafe, a reading space---be outpaced by the flickering speed of a screen. The haptic loss of turning a physical paper page, something that may well soon become a thing of the past, cannot be replicated by a tablet or e-book reader.
This transition from the haptic weight of a leather binding to the frictionless glare of a shiny screen is more than a change in medium; it is a slow slide into cultural desuetude. After all, "the medium itself is the message" as the media sage Marshall McLuhan once said. The consequences are truly profound. We are trading the sacred permanence of the printed word for the ephemeral pulse of a pixel, leaving our libraries as vestigial organs of a society that has forgotten how to sit still.
The qualitative stillness, the heavy, respectful hush of an old library that essentially forced contemplation, that made focused and meaningful engagement with the written word on paper not only possible but also immensely enjoyable, is now increasingly being replaced by the distractive and spiricidal silence of the blue light emitting digital screens and their thoroughly dehumanized users and consumers.
(Dervaish Ali, Quetta walla)
