its cover partly eaten by battery acid.
I was monumentally happy to find it.
The book is inscribed to “Jim Blaylock,
a hell of a neat dude,” the only existing
written evidence of that allegation.
Looking at the book again called to
my mind elements of the wild storm
that our cotton tent weathered on a
hilltop between Winnipeg and Re-
gina on that long-ago road trip and
the landscape along Lake Superior
and down into Chippewa Falls, Wis-
consin. Viki and I took turns read-
ing The Wind in the Willows aloud
while the other one drove—the 1960
Scribner edition with maps on the
end pages and both color and black-
and-white illustrations by Ernest H.
Shepard. I’ve reread it two or three
times since. The bookmark advertis-
ing the bookstore where we’d bought
it still lies safely inside: Austen Books,
1687 Haight Street, San Francisco. It’s
one of the thousands of quirky book-
stores that have vanished over the
past decades, leaving no traces asidefrom dwindling human memories and
paper bookmarks.
A canny reader might point out that
I’m confusedly considering books
as objects while failing to consider
the contents, and of course I am,
except that there’s no actual confu-
sion involved. Unless books are read
in various translations, the contents
are pretty much the same for every
reader, and an e-book will serve the
purpose as well as paper and ink. As is
true of angels, ten thousand e-books
can dance on the head of a pin, which
some readers see as an advantage. But
that’s the only angelic thing about in-
visible books. Even en masse, e-books
cannot add up to a library. An e-copy
of a book cannot smell of gasoline or
be disfigured by battery acid and so is
inarguably imaginary and not a proper
book at all. An e-reader crammed with
such “books” is merely a bucket of elec-
trons, and it’s a little-known fact that if
you shake your e-reader too hard, the
words will simply collapse into heapsof letters. A cardboard bookmark has
more substance.B
ACK in the 1970s I took to
buying two copies of every
“important” book that I
could get my hands on—
literary novels and collections of essays
and stories and poems; that is to say,
books likely to be recommended by
university literature professors noto-
rious for insisting that their students
think. I was a political creature in those
days and worried that the Forces of Ig-
norance would someday see fit to burn
books in the street. It seemed sensible
that I should squirrel away my hard-
cover books in the crawl space beneath
the house. I’d keep my paperback read-
ing copies of the same books in plain
view on the shelf. When the dreaded
day came, I’d hand over hundreds of
visible books, weeping convincingly
and promising to propagate stupidity
rather than a library. My plan hit the
reef, however, when it dawned on meJULY AUGUST 2019 26danny blaylockThe author’s book-filled study. “My favorite books are kept in my study, under the stairs in my house,” he writes.