Meanland: Appearances and Disappearances of Book Rooms and Stores
Diane Simonelli
September 15
My cousin can remember every one of her primary school teacher’s names. I’m gob smacked at how thorough her list is. ‘Who do you remember?’ she asks.
What I remember is a secret. When we think of secrets as adults, clandestine activities come to mind – information of an illegal or immoral nature – which is why I am hesitant to use the word. But there are all sorts of secrets. Small as mine was, I would never say it. On reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe I wasn’t so enchanted by adventures beyond the wardrobe door.
I was enthralled more by a labyrinth of rooms. Maybe I’m remembering what’s not there. It’s been more than three decades. I pick up the huge hardback C.S. Lewis wrote for his granddaughter Lucy. Three pages in, I find a visual I’ve been half-remembering for years:
“It was the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of, and it was full of unexpected places…and after that was a room all hung with green, with a harp in one corner; and then came three steps down and five steps up, and then a kind of little upstairs hall and a door that led out on to a balcony, and then a whole series of rooms that led into each other and were lined with books – most of them very old….”
The professor’s reading rooms were a far cry from what my home held: a smattering of Little Golden Books and two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for Children. Looking back, it’s of little surprise the image spawned dreams of night doors and passages in a house (my house but not my house) that kept growing new rooms. Shifting trapdoors emerged in wakeful imagination: one under my bed, another through the top of a giant wardrobe and a tiny open-to-air window within a larger glass frame leading to a cloud of transparent pages that vanished as quickly as they appeared.
I would close the bedroom door after my sister went out to play, my nonni tossing scopa cards across our home’s second kitchen table, my mother gathering ingredients for a meal whose preparation would take much of her time. We called it pasta al forno – pasta in the oven – until we began to use the Aussies’ name for it: lasagne. Once I was sure no one would catch me, I drew the curtains. On my bed, I spread myself out like a sheet. Pillow under head, eyes closed, I descended imaginary stairs, wooden and wobbling, echoes of my footsteps scaring me until I stood on a floor of dirt that didn’t dust up, every wall thick with books, me stealing bound paper and relief from planes overhead so loud I was afraid a bomb might drop through the roof to kill us all.
Such are the strength of memories. I didn’t have to live through the war to experience some of my grandparents’ fear. Such is the power of story. As well as steering night-time dreams and daytime machinations, C.S. Lewis’s book-lined rooms inspired in me a wish. I’m not sure if it has morphed over years, but this is it: a tall walled room lined with every story I had ever read and loved.
So you see why I baulked when Joe Konrath cleared his home of 300 books. That he had 4,700 physical books left was not the point. Here was the beginning of what would culminate in an extensive library of eBooks. Soon his book collection would be like his music collection – stored in a cloud in the sky.
I should be happy Tom Keneally is donating his personal library of 2,500 books to the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts. His is a generous act. It makes sense but I’m wondering; how can he let go so of so many books so early in his life and easily? Does this bother no one else? Am I holding too tightly to my picture of the author in an old rambling house walled with books?
We seem to be ridding ourselves on a global scale of paper books and the rooms holding them: our bookstores. Latest figures show that since 2005, the UK alone lost 2000 bookstores. With US eBook Sales up by 167% and net revenues from adult paperbacks down nearly 64%, no wonder St Mark’s Bookshop in New York is struggling. At the time of writing, 14,787 people had signed a petition to help save it.
On a national level, Australia isn’t looking any better. Australian Literary Review has lost financial support, Tasmania’s Island Magazine funding, and in 2012 it seems The Book Show will survive as a truncated version of itself covering only fiction under an umbrella that includes other Arts.
Even closer to where I live now, Meera Govil, who has organised countless author talks and literary festivals, some held at Monsalvat, may be forced to close Eltham Bookshop.
The only silver lining I can see lately is that author of Bel Canto, Ann Patchett, will open a traditional shop with digital back up in October. Her reasoning: “I can’t live in a city that doesn’t have a bookstore.”
I love eBooks. Last Thursday, after being moved by the play Café Scherezenade, I tried Booki.sh for the first time, whizzing through the novel’s first chapter on my iPhone before travelling to Albury for the Write Around The Murray Festival and seeing Arnold Zable speak of what language can and can’t do. Two weeks ago I was preparing for this post a different blog to the one you’re reading. I was going to have a good look at what BookTrack propose will enhance your reading of Salman Rushdie’s short story In The South: Music.
I’m thrilled to live in the digital age. Doors keep opening to new rooms where so much of what we’re doing are firsts. At the same time, we need to slow down and ask ‘what do we want in our future?’ before we are swept too far away from what we prize most.
Digital media is new and exciting. Staying open to explore what it has to offer us is integral. But let’s not lose ourselves in its cloud. If we want to continue to read Island Magazine, visit Eltham bookstore and listen to the Book Show, action is required.
Buy a copy of Island Magazine. Visit Eltham bookstore. Write a letter, email ABC or leave a comment on their website page. Let’s look after Australia’s literary treasures, not mourn them once they’re gone.
Our Friends
- Overland
- Alien Onion
- Ampersand Duck
- Andrew McDonald
- A Pair of Ragged Claws
- Arts Victoria
- Australia Council for the Arts
- Ben Eltham
- Bookshow blog
- CAL
- City of Tongues
- Crikey
- darkly wise, rudely great
- David Astle
- Elmo Keep Does Stuff
- The Ember
- Fly the Falcon blog
- Going Down Swinging
- Griffith Review
- Hackpacker
- Harvest
- HEAT
- Island
- Killings blog
- Literary Minded
- Lorraine Crescent
- Lynden Barber
- Mandy Ord
- Marcus Westbury
- Matilda
- Meanland
- Melbourne University Publishing
- Mel Campbell
- The Monthly
- Musings of an Inappropriate Woman
- Oslo Davis
- Paul Callaghan
- Read, Think, Write
- Sleepers Publishing
- Sorrow at Sills Bend
- SPLOG
- Tom Cho
- Virgule
- Wet Ink
- Wheeler Centre
Comments
18 Sep 11 at 6:54
‘At the same time we need to slow down and ask – what do we want in our future?’ So true! I enjoy your writings on our changing relationship with paper books and digital media. I read your article on my iPad and love podcasting etc. But paper books carry so many memories with them, and even though I need to cull a little from time to time, most of them get moved from house to house, and I wouldn’t want to part with them. Let’s hope Eltham bookstore can stay open!
...18 Sep 11 at 13:29
Great post. I delighted in those descriptions of the professor’s library as an adult, too.
And vive le both – digital and paper. There is so much that is sensual about an actual paper book – the smell (though my nose is not at all partial to the mold in old books, unfortunately), the way your body gets to share in the experience of reading more with a book than in its electronic form … picking new secondhand books up from the post office that have been bought online.
My own habits are probably also contributing to the decline of bookstores. You are right – if we want them to continue to exist, they need our support.
...19 Sep 11 at 11:32
Your post reminded me of an old book that I used to find in the midst of my Dad’s bookshelf when I was just a boy. The book itself captured my imagination. The spine was lost and the pages sat precariously between faded red covers spilling out like paper bark peeling from the tree. The book interrupted the flow of neat hard covers that made up the shelf and long before I could read I used to gaze at it wondering what treasures this old book might contain. I remember the day I finally mustered the courage to prize it gently out of its position careful not to scatter what was really just a pile of pages shabbily stacked. It was called “Beltane the Smith” by Jeffery Farnol. I read it, creating a new pile of pages next to the first as I leafed my way gingerly through the story. Black knights, a gentle and strong hero, a stunningly beautiful heroine and the ultimate triumph of good over evil and then I was placing the worn and musty back cover on top of the new pile of pages. Since then I have spent hours haunting second hand book shops looking for old Jeffery Farnol’s and other tattered and musty tomes. I can’t live without books, physical books with their dust and mould, surrounding me. Long may the second hand book shop live! I have a dream. When I retire it will be to the back of a very cluttered and dusty second hand book shop, where I will weave literary webs to catch book lovers and keep them looking and searching as the hours of the day slip away.
...20 Sep 11 at 17:22
Just as Ann Patchett “can’t live in a city that doesn’t have a bookstore”, I can’t live in a house that isn’t riddled with books. Thanks Diane for calling on us to preserve the love that many of us harbour for the printed page – no matter how attracted we are to the ease and convenience and affordability of digital works. I have always dreamed of a room lined floor to ceiling with spines I can climb, words to conquer, tomes to clamber over. What a wonderful vision. And I think I’m unconsciously recreating that very dream as I look around my home and see three rooms with bursting bookshelves, towers of books by the bed, piles on the couch, and gatherings by both loos – and not all of them mine. My 7 year old daughter is a contributor too. My Amnesty and ACF mag’s are being replaced by little golden books and Billie B Browne.
...23 Sep 11 at 0:23
I too was a child who descended/ascended into the world of the imagination created by fantastical words on a page. In a paddock on our farm, there was an enormous red-gum tree with scars in the bark which looked like two windows and a door. It was here where my flights into a fantasy world, which incidentally looked remarkably like Alice’s, occurred. Whilst I welcome the age of digital works, I regret my children may be reading a kindle or kobo under the blankets, rather than a magical book with its alluring, crusty pages. An excellent and thought provoking blog, Diane.
...29 Sep 11 at 19:29
Ah, Diane, The secret place I yearned for was Lewis’s boyhood home described in the author notes in the back of my copy of ‘The Lion …’ No rereading of the Narnia series was complete without reading and dreaming of this place.
It’s a quote from ‘Surprised by Joy’ that begins ‘I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books…’ There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient state of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves …'
...