The Romance of Paperbacks

When I was young I dreamed of libraries like the one I saw in a book of the Biltmore Estate that my parents brought back for me because I was too young and impatience to tolerate a tour. I coveted hardbacks, but more than that I yearned for leather bound and gilded editions of the classics.

I wanted books with atmosphere, elegance, and beauty. I have a few from those early years, leather bound classics discarded by my grandparents onto my eager bookshelves. Did she buy them by the yard, my grandmother? Probably. Some were old, plain hardback copies of Charles Dickens’s novels, black and austere. I loved them. Then there were the bourgie gilded books. The type that come from some specialty press that delivers a classic once a month by mail and mails out endless brochures of all the monthly series one could subscribe to. American classics, One Thousand and One Nights. These were my favorite books in those early years.

When I went to the bookstore I gravitated to the new fiction section because here were the hardbacks, which I assumed were more durable, meant to last, substantial. Even then I was an eager collector, though naive. I knew I wanted to build an insulated world of fantasy. What is a library but a cozy escape?

My break with hardcovers came when, having the hardcover copy of one of my favorite novels that I wanted, read leather and gold embossed, I found another hard back edition I wanted equally if not more. I began to discover that aesthetic sensibilities change, and that there are infinite numbers of beautiful hardcover editions of classics to be chosen from. I began to be a bit confounded.

Now I only buy hardcovers when there is no other choice, and I prefer paperbacks. I like their cheap accessibility. The way they crowd together on the shelf, always making room to accommodate one more companion. I like how they pack up in boxes on my nomadic journeys through academia, lighter, the library of a traveler. I’m less anxious when I handle them, though I treat my books carefully. I like to keep them fresh and new. Still, I don’t mind highlighting in a paperback I’m working on.

A hard cover like the ones I loved as a child are meant to be read at home in an overstuffed chair, near its home shelf. I don’t have a paperback copy of The Age of Innocence yet, and I don’t want to carry that weighty tomb to the library or a café, so it remains on the bookshelf, somewhat impractical. Meanwhile, other books make their way in and out without a thought. They travel to the NYPL, to have a cup of coffee or a sandwich, or a glass of wine. Perhaps they go for a walk in the park. If it’s relatively light I carry them and give myself that reassurance that I will never be bored. I peruse a few pages on the subway, in a waiting room.

My favorite paperbacks by far are French. Do you know the ones? With simple white spines, a red line around the boarder of the cover, and the title boldly printed across the front. As a child I liked gaudy book covers, but now I like the simple elegance of a book in uniform, matching its shelfmates with only slight variation in the borders around the edge and the different titles. A principle of design is to strip away the decorative until only the most fundamental is left, and to add from there. While I think I am slowly emerging from my modern period, where I’ve reveled in austerity and simplicity, and I’m beginning to enjoy decoration again, I still like those simple book covers, which accommodate themselves so well to their surroundings.

My least favorite cover is the generic lime green and black cover of The Country and the City by Raymond Williams. It’s not the only book of its kind. Who selected those colors? It clashes wildly with anything I set it next to, sadly unreflective of its content, which blends so seamlessly with the most up to date scholarship on literature and the city.

I have my eye on a number of paperbacks right now and I hope to report back here having obtained them for us. All that being said, I’ll admit I do want those Art Deco hard cover editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works, but with limited space I have to be economical about the hardcovers I let into my life.

Tell me, do you prefer hardcovers or paperbacks? Or do you read on a device? Tell me why in the comments.