In Praise of the Printed Word – My Love Affair with Books

I’m really excited to write this article.  It represents my first entry into the “Books and Literature” category here on The Renaissance Garden Guy.  I’ll be contributing many more articles to the site under this category in the coming weeks, months, and (hopefully) years.  Book reviews, genre examinations, guest articles, etc.  It’ll all be here.  (Maybe even an RGG original, or two.)  I’m also thrilled to be writing about books because I love them, specifically.  All books – old tomes, new volumes, first edition hardcovers, new paperbacks, used paperbacks – you name ’em, I love ’em.  A book is really unlike any other of humankind’s creations.  It straddles the boundary between the physical and ethereal worlds.  A book is the nexus of matter and thought.  A more remarkable invention has yet to be wrought by the mind, and hand, of humankind.

A book is both a doorway and its key.

Old Books 

The written word has been around for thousands upon thousands of years.  Cave paintings in the Grotte de Lascaux (Lascaux Cave network) in France are 17,000 years old.  These are actually pictographs – drawn or painted images created to relate or “tell” stories.  Early man painted images of animals on the walls of the caves of Lascaux in order to recall and preserve memories of particular activities – a hunt, for example.  These cave paintings represent humankind’s very earliest efforts to communicate visually and non-verbally, in a non-ephemeral way.  Beginning around 3,200 BC, ancient Egyptians told of their daily lives through hieroglyphics inscribed in stone, on pottery, or written on papyrus, with complete sentences emerging in approximately 2,800 BC.  Hammurabi’s Code is a Babylonian legal text which was carved into a piece of basalt in the 18th century BC.  Illuminated manuscripts first appeared in Europe in the kingdom of the Ostrogoths around 400 AD, and continued to be written through the 13th century AD.  Theses are fabulously handwritten texts (scrolls or books) lavishly adorned, or illuminated, with lustrous colored and painted illustrations, and often embellished with precious metals, such as silver or gold.  Books of Hours are illuminated manuscripts, in book form, which contain texts and prayers dedicated to Christian devotion.  These remained in handwritten, or manuscript form through the 15th century AD.

But the printed word is what we’re concerned with here.

The Diamond Sutra is considered to be the very first printed book.  It’s a Buddhist volume from China printed in the 9th century AD.  Printed books were first mass produced in 1455 AD, in Europe, using Johannes Gutenberg’s printing system of movable metal type.  It was in that year that the very first mass produced printed book, the Gutenberg Bible, debuted.  The activity of reading a book was, for the first time, available to the general population.  And as a result, the world would never be the same.  Ideas could spread faster than ever before.  Printed books were the internet, from 1455 right up through the time of, well, the internet.  Books printed before the year 1501 are known as incunabula.  And books printed in the year 1501 and later are referred to as “printed works,” or simply “books.”

Although my definition of “old books” is, in strictest terms, an evolving one – as I get older, the books do, too – for the purposes of what I’m writing here, “old books” means printed works from before 1901.

I’ve got a library consisting of thousands of books.  And a decent percentage of these are, according to the above definition, old books.  And even though I love dearly each and every volume in my library, I’m admittedly disproportionately partial to my old ones.  My current old book collection contains volumes printed as far back as 1551.  These venerable treasures are bound in leather or vellum.  (For an excellent overview of bookbinding materials and techniques, click here.)  The illustrations found in some of the very oldest of my books are hand-colored, black-line woodcuts.  The type in many is Gothic.  Or Fraktur.  Or Antiqua.  The leaves, or pages, are delicate and yellowed.  They often contain handwritten annotations by previous owners.  They smell of time.  To hold one of these ancient tomes in the hands is to cradle the heart of a lover.

These books are reliquaries – individual treasures of bookbinding beauty and printing skill, each containing, between its boards, the essence of miracles.  Whatever the magic printed across its leaves – fable or psalm, lesson or scripture, journal or play – an old book is an oculus opening upon buried landscapes.  The ingenuity, brilliance, toil, and passion – the being – of its author, and the mystery of its times, lies within. 

Within its pages, and within one’s hands.

And speaking of hands… 

I often think about the past owners of the old books that are in my collection.  I wonder who they were.  Who held these books in their hands so long ago?  Were they of the titled classes?  Royalty?  Were they common?  Who were they.  Who were they?  Lots of times, the handwritten annotations in the margins of a page can reveal a great deal about the past owner.  Or the quality of a book’s binding materials themselves may indicate the social caste of its previous or original custodian.  But what kind of man or woman?  How proud, or shy?  Pious or callous?  The question of who once dearly held, and read from, an old tome is never truly and completely answered.  Never.

So old books – their visual appeal, construction, subject matter, ownership, history – are my sentimental favorites.  Their revelations, as well as their mysteries, will always be irresitible to me.