Debate cont.: Calvino on Buy v. Borrow
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- August
- 21
I’m going to bring Italo Calvino into our discussion, which you can see here, about when to buy books and when to borrow them from the library.
It happens that I’ve just started reading some Calvino, the Italian author. (The back of one book jacket calls im “Italy’s most brilliant modern writer.” He lived from 1923 to 1985.) And in that volume, If on a winter’s night a traveler, he writes about the pleasure of buying a new book.
I should point out that he was specifically writing about the pleasure of buying his new book. So, clearly, he would agree with that sentiment on the back cover.
Anyway, the passage can apply to any new book which you just have to own, passing up all the other items in the bookstore for just that one purchase. Here’s what he says:
You derive a special pleasure from a just-published book, and it isn’t only a book you are taking with you, but its novelty as well, which could also be merely that of an objest fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacket begins to yellow, until the veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the binding becomes dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries. No, you hope always to encounter true newness, which, having been new once, will continue to be so.
(He published the book in 1979; the English translation came two years later.)
So. That’s Calvino’s two cents on the topic.
Any more?
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on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 9:29 am by Ken Valenti.
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I’ll bite, but with my own spin.
Unlike Calvino, I’ll sing the praises of old books.
There’s nothing like finding an old book buried in a dusty box beneath the yellowed pages of old essays scribbled in high school or outdated knitting patterns. You flip open the cover of plain cloth with no indication of what is inside, and then see the frontispiece of a damsel in distress in the dress of an earlier day, or a man in frock coat and knickerbockers, or a cavalier with sword and lace, and know you are about to step into the past. You hold in your hand the key to a room hidden behind the cobwebs of the ages and ignored by the neon-colored traffic rushing by outside. It is a secret place that takes you away from today’s assumptions, geography, economics and vice to a place frozen in a time your grandfather knew well. To hold and read an old book is to tear the skin off the future to see the heart within, to marvel at language silly or coy or poetic without apology. It’s to touch memory’s pathways and take a deep breath of a foreign land outside your door.