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On Monday morning, an apparently innocuous tweet summoned a storm of controversy on Twitter.
“Yesterday my colleague called me a ‘book murderer’ because I cut long books in half to make them more portable,” said the novelist and editor Alex Christofi. “Does anyone else do this? Is it just me?”
Yesterday my colleague called me a 'book murderer' because I cut long books in half to make them more portable. Does anyone else do this? Is it just me? pic.twitter.com/VQUUdJMpwT
— Alex Christofi (@alex_christofi) January 21, 2020
Responses were mixed.
As Natalie Morris reported on Metro, some respondents were decidedly outraged, calling Christofi’s actions “demonic” and Christofi himself a “book psychopath.” But others were torn.
Logically, they said, they could understand that it was fine for Christofi to do whatever he wanted to do with his own books. But emotionally, it was hard to look at books that had been cut in half.
My head says you can do what you like with your stuff.
My emotional response to this: pic.twitter.com/OblkUFXbLR
— DVdR (@DVDReeck) January 21, 2020
This outsize reaction and emotional conflict isn’t new to the internet. It tends to rear its head whenever we start talking about books as physical objects and how best to treat them.
When Marie Kondo suggested getting rid of books that didn’t spark joy, book lovers were outraged: Didn’t Kondo know that the best books would spur emotions that were much richer and more unsettling than joy? And when it became trendy to shelve one’s books by color, some readers sneered that such a practice was only for literary poseurs, that true readers who cared about their books as more than just decorative objects would never organize them so counterintuitively.
That reaction only intensified during the more short-lived trend of shelving one’s books spine-in, and after Town & Country reported that some celebrities hire book curators to give their libraries exactly the right look: This curator “will make not only your bookshelf pop, but also the veins in the eyes of every librarian in a five-mile radius,” said Cracked, adding that the curator’s “rich and dubiously literate clients” would never “run the risk of cracking those very fetch spines.”
On an anecdotal level, it became personally clear to me that many people feel strongly about the moral value of books as physical objects after I, a book critic and reporter who covers the publishing industry, aggregated an essay by professor Hannah McGregor arguing that it’s a little weird how we all fetishize books, and some readers kindly advised me to “please fucking die” because “this is anti-intellectualism, you stupid fucking bitch.”
We seem to project enormously intense feelings onto books, feelings that make us protective of them and furious toward those we perceive as threatening them. We think of our books as symbols of our taste, our intellect, our moral vigor. And when we hold books in such high esteem, those who treat them as objects rather than as symbols become infidels.
We started getting precious about books in the 18th century because marketers wanted us to
There is something deeply romantic about the idea of holding a physical book in your hands: feeling the weight of it, the smoothness of the pages, and above all else the smell. The smell of books is a particular obsession in popular culture; you can buy candles or perfumes that try to approximate it, and on TV, characters who love books are always demonstrating their bookishness by waxing poetic about the smell.
“Books smell musty and rich,” says Giles, the librarian on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “If it’s to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible. It should be, um … smelly.”
“Nothing, nothing smells like that,” sighs Rory on Gilmore Girls, cradling an enormous leather-bound book in her arms and huffing the pages.
The smell of a book doesn’t have anything to do with its contents. It has no moral function, it’s just the smell of paper. But if we’re reading physical books, then the scent of the book is intrinsic to the embodied experience of reading. And if we’re treating reading — any kind of reading, of any kind of book — as an inherent and objective good, then the book as object becomes its own kind of goodness by association. So the smell of the book, the aspect that is most insistently tactile, becomes good too.
In the essay that inspired people to send me death threats after I recommended it, McGregor argues that this fetish around the book as physical object can be traced back to the industrialization of paper production in the late 18th century, and the corresponding rise of an accessible book market for the home. That market, McGregor writes, “was actively invested in anthropomorphizing books, making them part of ‘the living world’ so that people could love them (by buying them).”
Gradually, over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, middle-class Americans were taught to aspire to bookishness, with the general understanding that bookishness would always be a moral good: “To be a reader is better than to not be a reader,” McGregor summarizes, “but one kind of reading or book is not better than another.” And because reading is good, all of the paraphernalia associated with reading — the pens, the bookmarks, the tea, the candles, the tote bags with kitschy quotes on them — all of that becomes good as well. And so, especially and of course, does the book itself: the book as object, worthy of special consideration and respect purely for existing as a book.
But the idea that reading is a purely moral good does not withstand close examination. President Donald Trump is an author, and his books are available for purchase and reading and smelling just as much as the works of Toni Morrison are. But it is not equally good for us, either morally or intellectually, to devote our attention to the books of both of those people. Trump’s ideas do not magically become more coherent or more valuable when they are encased within the slipcover of a book than they are when they are poured directly into his Twitter feed. Books are neutral vehicles for content, and that content can be either good or bad.
I want to be clear: I am saying all of this as someone who has devoted my professional life to books, who enjoys a kitschy book tote and has huffed many a page in my time. I understand the romance of the book.
But I also recognize that liking books does not make me a good or smart or special person. My preference for them is not a unique quality that proves my moral superiority, or in fact anything that it’s worth constructing my personal identity around. Neither is my preference for shelving my books spine-out, organized by genre and publication date. All of those preferences are value-neutral statements.
Books are an incredibly flexible technology. That means you can do whatever you want with them.
Here’s where I’ll stand up for the book as a physical object. The codex — the printed paper book that we hold in our hands, which took over for the scroll as our dominant reading format in the West in the fourth century AD — is an old, old technology. We’re still working out the kinks with e-books, but at this point, the codex is out of beta testing. Most of its bugs have been fixed over the past 17 centuries. It’s been streamlined and optimized into an incredibly simple, intuitive system.
And part of what makes the codex so valuable is that it is a malleable technology. It is easy for individual users to reshape it in whatever way best suits their own individual needs.
With a codex, you can get interactive with the text. You can dog-ear the pages if you choose. You can scribble in the margins and underline and highlight. You can rip a codex in half so it’s easier to carry around and dip into during your commute.
Or you can treat your books as decorative objects. You can organize them by color. You can build collages with their spines. You can rip out the pages and use them to paper your walls. If you want to make people really mad, you can rip a book into pieces and then organize the shreds by color.
None of these choices are moral failings — and all of them mean that you’re taking full advantage of the enormous flexibility and power of the printed book. And maybe that’s a power worth romanticizing.