From The Vintage News:
Book hoarding is a well-documented habit. In fact, most literary types are pretty proud of the practice, steadfast in their desire to stuff shelves to maximum capacity. They’re not looking to stop hoarding, because parting with pieces of carefully curated piles is hard and stopping yourself from buying the next Strand staff pick is even harder. Books have always had a fetishistic quality to them, with their dusty secretiveness. Now, though, it feels like we’re living through a special moment in the history of book design and beautiful books are everywhere.
The latest figures from the Publishing Association showed ebook sales falling 17% in 2016, with an 8% rise in their physical counterparts. At the same time, publishers’ production values have soared and bookshops have begun to fill up with books with covers of jewel-like beauty, often with gorgeously textured pages.
Whether the physical book goes the way of the hand-illuminated manuscript, an object of merely historical interest for all its beauty, or whether this ancient piece of technology is here to stay, we should all be celebrating the work of the designers and publishers who have responded to the gauntlet thrown down by ebooks with such aplomb.
We should also recognise that the most beautiful books of the last few years have also been some of the most brilliant and inspired. The care and attention lavished on those intricately illuminated medieval volumes said something important about what was written inside them, the value of the words within, and this is no less true today.
And that is the problem for an obsessive reader -- in one short lifetime there is a finite number of books that can possibly be read and to have wasted time on a lousy one is galling. Yet, for the very same reason, that book needs to be put back on the bookshelf half-finished -- why waste more precious reading time on a book that is failing to entertain or inspire you?
And that is one of the problems with leaving a book unfinished -- when you put it down, you realise you are never going to know what happened. Will there be a twist at the end? Will everything be miraculously and beautifully tied up? Or it reach the dead end where you had an inkling it was headed, confirming all your doubts? Some of this information can be gleaned by skipping straight to the last page, although it is highly unlikely that you will be able to do justice to the story by doing that. And in a way, doesn't this feel like cheating? Like you've started the race, skipped the middle, and sprinted over the finishing line. It is unsatisfying and almost meaningless.
