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Today:
Buy A Book
Posted: Nov 20, 2007 in Things to do, Culture
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Is it still possible to get excited about books? "Picasso: Life with Dora Maar"---I found this incredible book at a used bookshop for $34.98 and it was a bargain and it makes me feel more alive just looking at it and learning about these creative, fascinating individuals. Dora Maar was Picasso's lover and muse from around 1935-1945. This book has pictures of her apartment taken in 1997 just after her death, when the Musee Picasso did an inventory of her belongings. Also featured in this book are photos from her archive (Dora's photomontage surrealist experiments prefigure certain stop-action MTV hard rock music videos). The reproductions of Picasso paintings are uniquely fascinating to me in this book as they show the edges of frayed canvases giving them a sense of humanity and reality, since so many reproductions in art books are too slick to get the feel of a real canvas made of wood and nails and cloth and paint. There is the famous sequence of Maar's photos of the various stages in the creation of the massive Guernica canvas---and among the items found in her apartment was a ladder which was probably the same one Picasso climbed to paint the upper reaches of the famous mural. . Now here's the Thing to Do: Buy a book. Right Away like, now. Walk away from the computer…you can do it, I've got faith in you. Buy a book. It may be small, large, finely bound, trashy, incoherent, falling apart, unreadable etc---as long as it has potential. You don't even have to read it right away. Buy it and have fun with it. Add an epilogue to the blank pages at the end. Draw or collage illustrations. Do fun things with your book with your friends. Read aloud back and forth to each other and occasionally improvise additional words to the printed text. Sooner or later though, you will find a need to just sit down somewhere quiet and read it to yourself. Write back and let me know what happens to you and your books.www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Books-NEA-Study.html
I still enjoy the search for a good book. I think I get more excited about a good book than a good record. They're all good: ones with the cover missing, pages flying everywhere, first edition hardcover, books with inscriptions, all variations.
There are few greater joys than scribbling in the margins...smell of semi-musty old book...ink on paper... I love loaning them out and wondering where they've ended up after years of being passed around.
Books are fun, but I have to take exception to writing in the margins, etc. Books are works of art (unless they're textbooks).
You wouldn't buy the Mona Lisa and give her a Sharpie 'stache, would you? :)
I prefer my books to stay as pristine as possible. Read them, revisit them, but treasure them like gold.
Really? you never jotted a note in a margin? referenced another book? another screenplay? penciled in a question for the next reader? You never received a loaner with insightful comments tacked on? Multiple scripts crisscrossing along the borders? It's one of my favorite ways to leave and receive a book (purchased...not library-borrowed). What fun is it if you place it on such a lofty pedestal?
Guess what? [insert cringe here] I dog-ear pages too!
Books are fun, but I have to take exception to writing in the margins, etc. ...
Sorry Joe...I'm gonna have to go with the margin scribblers on this one.
Books want to be scribbled in, and dog eared, shoved in pocekts, and get wet from reading them on the beach or in the bath etc.
If you spend all that wasted thought and energy making sure your book looks pretty when you are done, did you really enjoy it?
If you are ever in Key West, check out Hemingways old house and look at the some of the books he kept close..Story ideas that came to him written in the margins, doodles, etc...
I don't think that it is comparable with giving the Mona Lisa a mustache, in fact I think it's quite the opposite. It's that personal touch and the readers idiosyncrasies, that when added to a book, make it a work of art...
s.h.
Textbooks are meant to be written in. I'll admit to liberally marking up my textbooks.
But a normal, everyday book I want to look and stay nice. Presentation is part of it for me.
Textbooks are meant to be written in. I'll admit to liberally marking up my textbooks. ...
Joe: At the risk of belaboring the Mona Lisa analogy:
Finding previous readers' scribblings in the margins of books is like observing people who are observing the Mona Lisa. I get a sense of how the book (or work of art, if you will) affected the reader, which sometimes is way more interesting.