A word (or many) about the pleasures I glean from holding a book. There is a tangible goodness that I derive from clutching a book between my fingers. It is a demure excitement, a pleasing curiosity with which I hold a book. Delicately, the way you'd cradle a newborn baby, I hold it with both hands, eagerly watching life unfold on its pages.
I love the pages that are (or may not be) handmade - the ones with the soft, ragged edges, or thick paper. I need to feel the paper, you know? None of the cheap stuff that wilts under my sometimes sweaty anxious finger; forget the paper that tears under my insistent, damp forefinger, wet from insatiable nail-gnawing.
And I do judge books by their covers. I prefer to see some uniformity in the design - can I determine the mood of the book from the colors on the cover? Do they correlate with the title? Who are those people? What is with that font?
I like Art (note the capital "A"), not -art-, the latter which, for the SOLE PURPOSE OF THIS RAMBLE!, can henceforth conjure up the following: t-art, f-art, art-sy, art-ishy... I don't like stuff that is bold just because it used bold colors, nor will I like it because it displays the latest hip and trendy design.
Pocket-sized vs. Order of the Phoenix-size? It doesn't matter, although like Goldilocks herself, I do find that books that match the length between elbow and wrist to be juuuuust right for me. And not so wide that when I get into the heart of the book I threaten to over-arch the spine.
And the smell of books. Ah... I would say that this is the lone exception to where I relish that ancient, musty, dusty smell of stale isolation. Books are like Gran'ma's attic - treasure troves that have waited idly for eons to be discovered. And so I ravage them and horde them away into the sanctuary of my own room, where they make quirky stacks that serve as snapshots into my life. True, there are more books teeter-tottering in my room than there are pictures of people.
Could it be that I pride the escapism of literary adventures to the grounding realities of human contact? Perhaps. Books are perhaps the only thing in my world that invite me in without hesitation, reservation or second-thoughts. I am wanted unconditionally in a way that transcends the pull of physical contact. I am transcended, upended... and my imagination accepts the key and I am set free...