September 24, 2020 65
Page-Turners
Leah Price
Inky Fingers:
The Making of Books
in Early Modern Europe
by Anthony Grafton.
Belknap Press/Harvard
University Press, 379 pp., $39.95
When Novels Were Books
by Jordan Alexander Stein.
Harvard University Press,
253 pp., $39.95
The pandemic has not spared books.
Booksellers responded to shelter- in-
place orders by skateboarding pack-
a ge s to c u rb s ide s , orga n i z i n g I n st a g ra m
reading groups, branding face masks.
None of this saved revenues from plum-
meting. Before the first month of lock-
down was over, one survey showed that
80 percent of independent bookstores
had furloughed or laid off workers.
Supermarkets and big- box stores that
remained open cut book orders; some
Walmart branches roped off paper-
back racks as “non essential.” Online
sales fared better, but not by much. Al-
though printed books are easier to ship
than many commodities—books were
e- commerce sites’ earliest proof of
concept partly because nonperishable
rectangles fit in the mail—Jeff Bezos
cast his company as a public utility by
ostentatiously prioritizing “essential
goods” such as lentils and hair dye over
Amazon’s signature product. School
closings cut demand for textbooks,
along with most parents’ time for lei-
sure reading. By early April, bookstore
sales were 11 percent lower than they
had been the previous spring.
T hat’s not so bad, compared to the 50
percent drop in sales of clothing. The
lockdowns that depressed purchasing
power also opened up time soon filled
by fiction, traditionally consumed by
old or female readers—that is, people
stuck at home. By April, even liter-
ary preppers stocked with triplicates
of Saramago’s Blindness resorted to
price- gouged coloring books to stem
our children’s 24/7 demands for read-
alouds. Books categorized as “games,
activities and hobbies” sold 25 percent
more—a smaller gain than markers,
which spiked 81 percent. Board books,
those chunky hardbacks laminated to
protect against drool (and, more re-
cently, wet wipes) sold 30 percent more
in the first full week of April than they
had the previous year.
Other genres weathered the crisis in
digital form. Audiobook consumption,
initially down as cars idled in driveways,
rebounded even more spectacularly in
libraries than on direct- to- consumer
platforms such as the Amazon- owned
Audible. In the first week of April,
Overdrive, the largest distributor of
e- books and audiobooks for US librar-
ies, reported a 30 percent increase in
borrowing worldwide. While nation-
wide statistics are not yet available, one
Florida library system saw a 22 percent
jump in the use of their primary e- book
supplier, and a 68 percent increase for
their supplier of children’s and young
adult books. Lockdown changed not
just how much Americans read, but
what. Back in March, sales of Camus’s
The Plague followed the upward curve
of Covid test results. Couples stuck at
home together borrowed Relationship
Goals: How to Win at Dating, Mar-
riage, and Sex. Search engines gave
Nora Roberts’s 2018 thriller- romance
Shelter in Place a new lease on life. The
worst of times for travel guides was the
best of times for cookbook downloads:
What good is panic- bought yeast if you
haven’t panic- borrowed books that tell
you what to do with it?
Yet reading turned out to be only
the beginning of what people do with
books during a pandemic. Like T- shirts
scissored into masks, printed matter
found itself commandeered for new
uses. Lacking fellow commuters from
whom to screen myself, I needed to
requisition my copy of War and Peace
to prop my laptop to a less unflatter-
ing camera angle. Other Zoom users
devised library- themed backgrounds
to blot out the dirty dishes; soon, inde-
pendent bookstores uploaded virtual
wallpapers featuring their shelving.
Bookcase Credibility, a Twitter ac-
count that rates webcam backdrops,
deducted points for volumes grouped
by color. When Trump brandished a
Bible at arms’ length with the spine
turned away from him, he was “wag-
horning,” a verb coined by the found-
ers of Bookcase Credibility to describe
journalist Dominic Waghorn’s practice
of shelving one book on an otherwise
ordinary shelf tantalizingly back to
front. A new breed of advice colum-
nists recommended positioning your
laptop to make the presence of books
visible while leaving their titles illegi-ble to ward off embarrassment.
Books were becoming props, but
also bunkers. In May, my Zoom screen
introduced me to a “stay safe, read
books” T- shirt sold by a Brooklyn
bookstore to raise funds for hard- hit
industry workers. Variants exhorted
me to “keep safe, keep reading” and
“stay home, read books.” Reading was
becoming a palliative for loneliness and
boredom, a virtual substitute for the
temptations of hand- to- hand contact.During earlier epidemics, on the
contrary, books themselves posed
the danger. Eighteenth- century of-
ficials dipped in seawater the Bibles
on which shipmasters swore that their
cargo had been duly disinfected. Bib-
liographically transmitted disease
started to worry readers in the nine-
teenth century, once taxpayers began
to support public libraries that lacked
the social exclusivity of their members-
only predecessors. Novels were con-
sidered especially likely (accordingly
to the late- nineteenth- century novel-
ist Rhoda Broughton) “to have been
thumbed and read by convalescent
scarlet fevers and mumps.” Librarians
responded by inventing “book fumiga-
tors” that gassed volumes with sulphu-
rous acid. Life would become safe, one
former librarian speculated in 1890,
only “when we have foregone [sic] or
disinfected our books, boiled our milk,
analysed our water, killed our cats, de-
clined to use a cab, adopted respirators,and sternly refused to shake hands with
our friends.” A century later, when a
nurse at a New York hospital contacted
the local branch library to check out
books for HIV- positive readers, library
volunteers refused, invoking fears for
their safety.
The sense through which we usu-
ally encounter the page is sight. Re-
cent events have awakened readers’
awareness of touch, nudging us to
notice whose hands have touched the
pages that we ourselves are turning.
In the private sector, the May 1 strikes
sparked by Amazon’s withholding of
“personal protective equipment, pro-
fessional cleaning services and hazard
pay” called attention to the economic
and bodily safety of the workers who
packaged and delivered the reading
material that whiled away white- collar
lockdowns. Libraries, long one of the
first places Americans turn to during
a disaster, were asked to fill in for the
steadily lengthening list of shuttered
institutions. Some counties kept read-
ing rooms open even after schools had
closed. Others required librarians to
clock in to buildings empty of patrons.
At the other end of lockdown, libraries
became some of the first public institu-
tions to open, even if just for curbside
book deliveries. More fundamentally,
the assumption that a closed reading
room implied “slumbering” workers
who could be furloughed (or even,
in Minneapolis, reassigned to staff
homeless shelters) lent urgency to long-
simmering resentment over politicians’
perception of the library as nothing
more than a physical space warehous-
ing books.
The ingenuity with which librari-
ans repurposed book drops as mask
drops and made Wi- Fi available in the
parking lots outside closed branches
shouldn’t distract from the remote
services libraries had been provid-
ing all along. Neither e- book check-
out nor online medical reference nor
over- the- phone help filling out unem-
ployment forms—all of which spiked
during the lockdown—was anything
new for librarians. What is new, how-
ever, is a tangle of post- lockdown ques-
tions about how to reconfigure reading
rooms and “quarantine” books in be-
tween loans. Some libraries have had
to warn patrons against microwaving
volumes: their metal radio- frequency
ID chips risk combustion.In shifting from plague- themed nov-
els to lockdown- occasioned reading
to germ- infested woodpulp, my focus
here has moved from texts to practices
to objects—or, mapped onto academic
disciplines, from literary criticism to
history to bibliography. A homeschool-
ing parent who gives The Plague five
stars on Amazon for “Great use of vo-
cabulary” is analyzing the novel’s ver-
bal content; the reviewer whose own
boredom is validated by noticing that
passages highlighted by other readers
cluster in “the first part of the first sec-
tion, and the last part of the last sec-
tion” is extrapolating to a history of
reading habits; and the reviewer who
subtracts three stars because “it may
be prime fulfilled and cheap” but “theJohn Raphael Smith: Beauty in Search of Knowledge, 1781British Museum