#notes/books

In progress.

Books

About

A book is defined as a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers. This is the definition I was thinking of when I made this page.

It can be further defined by the division of a literary work, script of a play, or can be used to reference the act of studying. The word book is also used when you're making a reservation or claiming a seat on transportation, keeping a record of bets, binding matches and stamps, or leaving suddenly. Books don't always have words in them.

I have always loved books. Even if I don't read them I like to collect and be around them. When I was beefing up my at-home library, I got myself a few books per genre/interest so that I'd have a selection when I wanted something new to read, but didn't want to buy something. Though I've minimized my library since, it still serves that purpose in some ways. (I am thankfully better at identifying books I'd like to keep.)

As a kid, books were an escape; they are how I got away from my life as a "weird" child. I had undiagnosed autism, I was depressed, and on top of that, a natural loner so I didn't recognize that it was "bad" that I liked to be alone. My depression stemmed from rejection and abandonment, not loneliness. Being alone was wonderful. One could go anywhere in a book, and I am not just talking about books from the POV of a cat or dragon, but also biographies and historical accounts of places and times you'll never go.

My experiences/history

I was a bookseller for 6 years and I've been a reader my whole life! I love reading books about books and have a few in my library waiting for my attention.

Quotes

from Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II by Elyse Graham (published in 2024)

Books

Books remind us of the brutal follies of tyrants, big and small. They teach us that knowledge is an ongoing process, not a fixed set of givens. (Page 9)

a book is—to quote the poet John Milton—a human spirit treasured up for a life beyond life. If the Nazis were to succeed in utterly wiping a people from the Earth, they would have to destroy their books as well. (Page 10)

The event was reportedly a bit of a farce, since books don’t actually burn very well; the fires took an embarrassingly long time to get going and, afterward, books were retrieved from the piles barely charred. But people around the world recognized the threat for what it was, and they protested vehemently against the conflagration. (Page 10)

"You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds.” (Page 10)

a new field arose in both literature and history departments called book history, the study of the material history of texts. It is a discipline saturated with mourning—with a moral urgency to recover lost worlds from the documents those worlds left behind. (Page 359)


Garden