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COMMENTARY
October 9, 2010
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They look so frail, now -- this "parcel of Penguins" that has resurfaced from my own distant past. They are from a time less than half a century ago, yet to a person who has lived the intervening years, they may come as archaeological relics.I am referring, of course, to paperback books, not birds from Antarctica. The collective noun provides a happy play on words, for I believe "parcel of penguins" is correct for the birds -- as opposed to a rookery, crèche, or huddle of them. Every child of the English language discovers, or ought to have his moment of discovering this wonderful world, in which we speak of a "siege of bitterns," a "clattering of jackdaws," a "musket of lyrebirds," a "gaggle of geese." And in case one has forgotten, today we have Wikipedia. A "parcel of penguins" is quite literally what one used to receive, through the post, when far away from home. They were printed on paper not only cheap, but light; they were 7-1/8 by 4-3/8 inches strictly (a Golden Section); they tied together in a nice secure block. And no gift from home could be more welcome. I have spoken with a man who was raised under Communism, in Hungary. He spoke of the thrill when a parcel of Penguins made its way to him, through the Iron Curtain. In another case, I recall such a parcel travelling into the mountains of Nepal, as birds not flightless. In my anti-hippie youth, when I lived like a hippie on the road in Asia, I lugged a satchel that invariably contained a parcel of Penguins, or other paperbacks like them: "Bantams" or "Signets" or sometimes "Livres de Poches." But leave these aside: Penguins were, from their invention in the 1930s, "the original and genuine article, in a class by themselves." The brilliant marketing idea behind them came from the publisher, Allen Lane. There were already paperbacks in railway stalls: cheap trash in lurid covers. What if fine literature was put there, too, as cheap in price, within understated covers? Would people buy them? And millions did. This genius of capitalism later employed the great Swiss typographer, Jan Tschichold, to impose classic typographical conventions, that would make the books physically more readable than any other kind of train-stall material. Later still, he employed the great Italian designer, Germano Facetti, to transform those plain covers into elegant pictorial works of art. The typography remained almost dramatically understated, but absolutely distinctive. (It is seldom appreciated today, that among the rhetorical devices, litotes can be as effective as hyperbole.) And it was partly the thrill of finding a new cover, that preyed on the collector's impulse, and got us reading, almost tricked us into reading, everything from Apuleius to Zola, from Basho to Wang Wei. All this happiness came flooding back upon me, in the middle of a very trying week, when searching through a storage locker for hideous legal documents. I came upon this old parcel of Penguins, and my heart stopped in recollection of freedom and youth. In the time since, I have tried to build libraries. I have come to insist that a book be "permanent"; properly stitched, on acid-free paper; properly cased to withstand the ravages of time. It is a vanity in this era, when the culture of books has shrunk to a small sub-culture. If any in the rising generation have the attention span for books, they read them on "hardware and software platforms," for as long as the power holds out. Touch each of these frail things, turn the autumn'd pages, and a lost world springs back to life, together with an effective demonstration of the (lost but recoverable) art of mnemonics. The human memory works on associations of remarkable complexity. The book once read was not simply "a text." Every chapter, page and phrase was steeped in a precise, almost holy, physical embodiment. The reduction of that text to electrons, and of every book to an identical transaction, is a wanton impoverishment of all particularity, and thus of memory itself. It is why people cannot remember reading things they most certainly have read, on electronic screens; and why, conversely, my memory of what a book contained comes flooding back to me from the moment when I merely touch, handle, even smell the old paperback -- returned to me as if in a parcel mailed through time. For it is impregnated with this richly actual (not "virtual") field of associations. But also, something more. In the very frailty is an apprehension of this transient world, carrying the sense that we ourselves will not be here much longer. And with the discernment of such frail vessels, comes all the beauty of this world. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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