On Not Being a Reader

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From Nerdy Book Club:

Long ago and not so long, I drove over to have a look at the little village of Whiteleaf in the Chiltern Hills where I was born and lived until I was sixteen.  A huddle of cottages crouching under a majestic hill, surrounded by beechwoods, magical as all childhood places (or at least our memories of them) are.  My climbing tree with my initials cut into it. . . the mysterious trenches deep in the woods, dug by soldiers during the First World War. . .  the secret lane leading to the only place where white violets grew. . .  all present and correct!

Then I wandered down the quiet village street, once a prehistoric pathway known as the Icknield Way, to visit our little library, housed in an old wooden barn.

But the library had gone.  The barn had gone.  The thatched cottages, two on either side of it, looked just the same as usual but the library had vanished.

‘Where is it?’ I asked a villager.  ‘What happened?’

‘Burnt down!’ the old man said.

‘Burnt!’

‘It was only books.  What’s that to you?’

In truth, I must have borrowed books from our village library no more than a dozen times – and the last one I never returned – but the loss of our library shocked me.  I kept worrying away at it like a gap in one’s mouth between two teeth.

. . . .

True, my father used to enchant my sister and me by coming into our little bedroom with his small Welsh harp, and sitting beside our bunk bed, and singing-and-saying wonderful Celtic folk-tales, full of mystery and magic.  How many nights did his gentle voice calm the rampant tigers on our bedroom curtains, and soothe the storm beating outside?  How many nights did we fall asleep to the ripples and arpeggios of his harp?

But not even this was sufficient to turn me into a reader.  And neither was college, really, where I chose to major in English Language and Literature, in the hope of beginning to catch up, and catch fire. . .

. . . .

What about publishing?’ said the voice.  ‘Would you like to work in publishing?’

My girlfriend’s father was a director at the venerable House of Macmillan – and so it was that, as number three in the publicity department, I was hired by the publishers of Lewis Carroll and Charles Kingsley and Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats and Thomas Hardy and and and. . .

. . . .

Rather late in life, it has been my great good fortune to find a home with an independent publisher who really cares about every aspect of a book – concept, word, image, paper, font, sales – and who welcomes author and artist into the family of the firm:  Walker Books in the UK, and Candlewick in the USA. Do you know Jack Gantos’ hilarious Dead End in Norvelt in which the hero builds a book igloo and loves ‘to sniff the insides of books. . .  because each book has its own special perfume’?  Quality not only of content but production – this is surely the way to go, and what will enable the printed book to survive despite the ocean of tweets and twitters and computer games and social media.

Link to the rest at Nerdy Book Club