Social Media Highlights Our Relationship With Books

Recently this photograph has made the rounds on Facebook:

In case you can’t read the text, it reads 

“A book commits suicide every time you watch Jersey Shore.”  

I found it hilarious, and metaphorically accurate!  I commented on Facebook that it was representative of all reality t.v. shows.  So many of my friends “liked” and commented on the photo, even friends that don’t read compulsively and aren’t bookworms.  They shared this sentiment at least in part.  To be fair, it may just be Jersey Shore backlash, but I don’t think so.

This question arose from observing the reactions to the photo, “Is reality t.v. actually helping increase book sales?”  I took stock of how often I’d turned the t.v. on in the past month looking for something informative or entertaining, only to turn it off in disgust less than 5 minutes later.  Several hundred channels and there’s nothing on!  Not even on my DVR!  What the bleep, people?  Again, I asked myself if this might not be a contributing factor to the increase in e-book sales.  While my trend-spotting radar says “Yes”, I have no definitive proof, only anecdotal evidence.  As in, my own observations.

In addition to the above photograph, a link to a website called “Book Porn” was Tweeted this past week by Susan Haws, a member of my writers’ group.  The name sounded just awful, but Susan is so conservative, it had to be a play on words.  So I bit and clicked out to www.bookshelfporn.com.  It was not, as I feared, so many books on pornography being sold off a virtual shelf.  Instead, it is photograph after mind-numbing, drool-worthy photograph, of places with bookshelves.  These can be home libraries or public ones, bookstores or works of art made from books.  It is incredible and astounding, and I’m so mad that I didn’t think of it first.  All I’d have needed to do is scan and upload to the internet all of the pictures I have saved over the years of different places and ways people store and display books.  There are some on their site that I have in my scrapbook, and there are some I have that they do not.  Drool worthy ones that I might share some day.  

This site points toward another trend:  The Comeback of the Hardcover Book.  We who love books will always love the sensory experience that comes with holding a book.  Not just the heft of a hardcover in hand, but the smell, the weight of the paper it is printed on, the design and color of the cover and the end papers, the subtle nuances upon which a true bibliophile can base a relationship with a book.  There was even this quote among the photographs on Bookshelf Porn:

"Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us."

Why second hand bookstores smell so good, from “Perfumes:  The Guide” by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.

Another quote on this site is something that I’ve done in my own life, long before ever hearing this advice:  

“We need to make books cool again.  If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.”  John Waters

More than once, I’ve had a date pick me up at home and upon entering, the comment was made, “You have too many books!”  It’s not like my home is a fire hazard.  They just don’t all have a home.

“There is no such thing as too many books.  There are just too few bookshelves,” I’d reply.  They might as well have insulted my friends to their faces.  I was deeply offended, and more than a little hurt. 

There was never a second date.  I knew there would not be before I picked up my purse to leave with the guy for the first date.  Once those words left their lips, there was not a chance in hell he was going to get lucky, that night, or ever.  

My mother read to me whilst she was pregnant with me.  She took me to the St. Louis Public Library when I was two weeks old, that is not a typo, and got me my first library card.  The librarian tried to dissuade her at first, but didn’t have an argument for the fact that there was no age requirement for someone to acquire one, only a parent’s or guardian’s signature.  By the time I was two years old, I was reading on my own.  Not Chaucer or Shakespeare, but first readers.  By the time I reached school, I was impatient with those just learning and read ahead because I wanted to know what happened next.  When it was my time to read the next sentence aloud, I had no idea where we were.  I’d been too absorbed in the story, and I was passed over.  The nuns were scary, and I didn’t want to admit I’d broken the rules.  The day the school called my mother and said they would have to hold me back because I could not read, she almost fell off her chair.  They sorted it out pretty quickly, and I was left alone to read ahead after that.  

My point here is, books have been an integral part of my life, and I could never form an intimate relationship with someone who does not himself have at least an understanding of my love of books.  It was at one time my goal to read every book in the library, and I developed a system to get through them all before I realized that not all books are created equal, therefore not all books are worth reading.  Today it is my goal to own a house with enough room to create a library.  Anyone I am with will have to know going in that this is a non-negotiable item.  Indoor plumbing, a library, and a garden.   Electricity is optional, but not the library or running water.  

One of the loveliest blog posts I have seen to date is “A Girl You Should Date” by Nona Merah at http://nonamerah.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/869/?refid=12.  In it she describes why a boy should love a girl who reads, and how to approach her once he finds one such female.  A quote from her post:

"Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve." --Nona Mereh 

And finally, I leave you with this link to “20 of the World’s Most Beautiful Libraries”:  http://www.oddee.com/item_96527.aspx, yet another reason to thank www.bookshelfporn.com.

All this social media chatter around books is good news for writers and the publishing industry.  The last few days I have been held hostage by a manuscript that I hope to get out in e-book form this fall, and another one I’d love to see in hardcover next year.  We’ll see if I break free in time.  Meanwhile, it is nice to know that market demand for reading material is, for whatever reason, on the rise.

Until next time, fellow travelers on the road paved with words, go do your share to increase our collective IQ's and GDP's:   Turn off the bad television shows, and read a book instead!