Bibliothanatos, or epigraphs for a last book
Once, in the future, a man wanted to keep a secret safe from everyone. He wrote it down into a book.
Once, in the future, some child will have to look up what a book is on the computer. What a book was.
Once books go, can we still use the word binding, or bound? What will bind us together now, what will be bound? Certainly nothing between covers.
In other words, what to make of margin, or marginal, in a postbook world?
I like the archaic English for book: boke. As in Chaucer, at the end of Canterbury
Tales, disavowing himself of “the boke of
Troilus, the boke also of Fame, the boke of the five and twenty Ladies, the
boke of the Duchesse, the boke of Seint Valentines day of the Parlement of
briddes.” It’s like book, but
only in past-tense.
Pages are more fraught than screens. With a page you’re
reading, you always know there’s a page you’re not reading just on the other
side.
Bookmarks: (personal) envelopes, pencils and pens, an ermine’s baculum (penis bone), my father’s expired driver’s license, a scrap of a dead neighbor’s ex libris on which I wrote the word bibliothanatos; (historical) Mao had bookmarks made featuring his sayings, “Be serious, be active,” bamboo bookmarks from Nepal, cornhusks from Czechoslovakia, American bookmarks made as advertisements for Heinz in the shapes of pickles; it’s believed that Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) first popularized bookmarks; the term now indicates a computer function that holds a webpage detailing the life of Elizabeth.
Revelations is the last book of the Bible, at least of the New Testament. It seems too obvious that the Bible should end with Apocalypse. No good fictionwriter would have allowed it.
H., a librarian friend, mentioned once that he’d cataloged nearly thirty books called “The Last Book,” or a variation on that title.
People enthuse about the smell of books, but it is only the
smell of dust. This instructs in mortality: After the book is composed, it
decomposes. That (and other reasons) is why there are multiple copies.
People enthuse over touching a book (haptics): texture, heft in hand. It should be noted for posterity that if you closed your eyes and ran
your fingertips over a page, you could tell which parts of that page were blank
and which held ink. Words were palpable, words felt palpable, until the advent of
recycling, and digital printing, the 1990s.
The taste of books. Monks poisoned the pagetips of forbidden
books to punish their readers. Rabbis placed honey there to encourage students
to lick, and go forward. Lick, and proceed.
At least that was the story I heard
from my uncle (not a monk, his name is Cohen, too).
I asked, But then when you finished
the lesson and shut the book, wouldn’t all the honeyed pages stick together?
He
said, The problem with your generation is not just that you can’t tell a story,
it’s that you can’t listen to one neither.