“All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.” - Carl Sagan

The pages are yellow and I can’t help wondering if they had ever even been white. It cost £2.50 in the U.K., in 1985, and $4.95 in Canada. It was “recommended” to sell for $7.95 in Australia. An American price is not listed.

It is the same size and shape as the book with the same title I read in grade ten. The cover art is the same as well.

The corner on page 122 has a line where it has been folded, which is strange to me; page 122 is on the left-hand side and whenever I fold a page corner down to mark it I always do so on the right.

“SELF-RELIANT LEARNING PROGRAM” is stamped in blank ink across the top of the book, across the breadth of its pages. I know nothing more about this program.

It smells like old-book which, while you wouldn’t make millions bottling and selling it, is not altogether unpleasant.

I got it from a book swap, picked it up out of curiosity, out of a sudden half-remembrance of high school essays. I don’t know who put it on the table, who read it before me, or who read it before them. As I curled up with it last night I had the briefest thought that I was about to sleep with every person this book has ever slept with, and I found that thought strangely comforting.

A banana had gone bad in my school bag. I was nine, I was in grade four and I was only several months into my term at a new school. Everything in my bag smelled like banana. Everything. I had to get a new bag.

Charlotte’s Web smelled like banana mixed with old-book, which was not as offensive an odour as one might first assume. I imagined it’s what monkey libraries must smell like. If anyone in West End Toronto has read a copy of Charlotte’s Web that smelled vaguely like bananas, that was me.

The first real book I wrote was in Grade 3. It had a laminated cover and was spiral bound and when I changed schools I brought it to Mrs. Dodds, the school librarian. She was so impressed she made it a part of the school library. There was a pocket on the back cover and an honest-to-goodness card in the pocket for students to sign the book out. I loved going to the library after school every other week or so, holding my book in my hands, looking to see if anyone had signed it out. Few people ever did, but every name on that list widened my smile just that much more. Actually, given this correlation, I’m glad more people hadn’t signed it out as the resulting grin might have caused permanent damage to my cheeks.

And it’ll happen one day, we’ll blink our eyes or twitch an index finger and the latest Stephen King novel will find its way onto the tablet we’re holding in our hands. It’s the tablet we bought at Radio Hut for $49.95 and accidentally dropped on our uncle’s back porch that time last summer, remember that? That’s where that scratch on the corner came from.

Oh, and look there, on the back at the bottom. See those tiny little pieces of paper stuck there? We never were very good at removing price tags, were we?

The tablet will have stories all its own to be sure, perhaps as many as any book, but they’ll only ever be our own stories.

Books connect us in a way that is physical and real and, perhaps most importantly, in a way we have no real degree of control over; the connections are chaotic.

I’m sleeping with every person my book has ever slept with.

Books touch random people at random moments in their random lives, but there’s always a constant, isn’t there?

Forget about the story inside for a moment and think how we—often enough for me to generalize, I believe—treat our books with respect. With the exception of the odd banana accident, we treat our books well, don’t we? Even if the content within has disappointed us, or angered us, or fueled whatever emotion of ours we secretly loathe, the book survives and is given to the library for a book drive or to a young niece or nephew who don’t know enough about tripe yet to recognize it in literary form. Our respect for the form usually outweighs any lack of it for the content, doesn’t it? Or am I wrong?

And it’ll happen one day, we all know it. The tablets are coming. Cutting down trees is hard work. If our ancestors could have relied on a picture of a log cabin to keep them safe from the elements they would have.

But we will lose something in that transformation, something very valuable. Sure we’re coming up with new ways every day to connect with people around the globe, but for me, and I hope for whomever currently has that copy of Charlotte’s Web, nothing will ever beat a book.

Filed under: Life Happens