Caveat Lector: I Had a Book on My Bookshelf…

You might have heard that here in the DC/Northern VA area we received a snowfall somewhat larger than usual this past weekend. Snowmageddon! The Snowpocalypse! Ragnarok is at hand…

Over on Twitter, The Washington Post Book World’s Deputy Editor Ron Charles (@RonCharles) put it into perspective when he commented that his “saintly mother-in-law” closed the local Christian Science Reading Room because of the snow: “The last time was Pearl Harbor, I believe.” Pennsylvania Avenue is deserted. The Metro isn’t running above ground. Even (gasp) Tyson’s Corner Center closed early yesterday!

Gracious, gracious; what WILL we all do? Seriously: First we must take care of family, friends, neighbors, and strangers who don’t have power or shelter. 

But after that? Snowball fight! Then back inside to read, knit, cook, talk, drink, read some more, and watch movies. Mr. Bethanne and I have been alternating stories in print with stories in Technicolor. Since Friday, I’ve read “The Seven-Year Bitch” by Jennifer Belle, “The Pluto Files” by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and finished “Matterhorn” by Karl Marlantes. We’ve watched “Dangerous Liaisons,” “The Great Escape,” “The Lives of Others,” and “Out of Africa.”

It was the last which inspired today’s post (you might have been able to guess that from its title). You might believe that I’m going to write about Isak Dinesen (the pen name of Karen, Baroness von Blixen) and her beautiful prose (and I do love her prose), but that’s not what struck me on watching the movie. (Tangent: While Meryl Streep’s performance as Karen Blixen is wonderful, Robert Redford’s Denys Finch-Hatton is a caricature, and the 1980s faux-backdrop cinematography in some scenes set my teeth on edge.)

One of the “signs” that Karen is intrigued by Finch-Hatton is when she wanders into his room at Nairobi’s Muthaiga Club and discovers his well-stocked bookshelves. When Berkeley Cole surprises her in the midst of her snooping, she sighs over Finch-Hatton’s “beautiful books” and asks “Does he lend them?” 

My brain itched a little after that scene, but it wasn’t until a later one in which Karen and Denys are putting his books away on shelves in her beautiful farmhouse when I realized why I felt that itch. None of the books had jackets!

Well of course none of the books had jackets. The story takes place in the early 20th century. Book jackets as we know them, including blurbs, artwork, sometimes an author photo, and always some form of publisher promotion (even if only a colophon), weren’t commonly manufactured until the 1920s. The books that Finch-Hatton and Blixen owned were still lovely and often individually distinguished items: Their endpapers, marbled edges, embossed covers and stamped spines make those volumes special.

However, even if the covers of those pre-advertising-explosion halcyon days give you title, author, and publisher, they don’t give much of a hint about what’s inside.

How did people find out what to read?

I suspect that word-of-mouth and book reviews had something to do with it. Bear with me for a second; I come not to bash paper books, but to consider a possibility. One of the things many readers and folks in publishing have derided about the rise in e-readers and digital publishing is that e-books don’t have dust jackets/book design/information (of course, eventually they’ll have all that and more…), things that readers have come to take for granted over the last decades.

I wonder: If we don’t have the same number of immediate ways to evaluate a book, might there be a resurgence in reader reliance on reviews and word-of-mouth marketing? What do you think?