Reading Is At The Beginning Of The

We Seem To Live A Culture That Doesn't Want Blemishes. The Vision Of Most Beautiful Models... Airbrushed In Order To Be Seen As Perfect, Infects Our Notion Of How Literature Should Be Written.

It Has Always Been My Experience That, Whatever Groupings I Choose For My Books, The Space In Which I Plan To Lodge Them Necessarily Reshapes My Choice And, More Important, In No Time Proves Too Small For Them And Forces Me To Change My Arrangement. In A Library, No Empty Shelf Remains Empty For Long. Like Nature, Libraries Abhor A Vacuum, And The Problem Of Space Is Inherent In The Very Nature Of Any Collection Of Books.

At Different Times And In Different Places I Have Come To Expect Certain Books To Look A Certain Way, And, As In All Fashions, These Changing Features Fix A Precise Quality Onto A Book's Definition. I Judge A Book By Its Cover; I Judge A Book By Its Shape.

Maybe This Is Why We Read, And Why In Moments Of Darkness We Return To Books: To Find Words For What We Already Know.

Our Society Accepts The Book As A Given, But The Act Of Reading -- Once Considered Useful And Important, As Well As Potentially Dangerous And Subversive -- Is Now Condescendingly Accepted As A Pastime, A Slow Pastime That Lacks Efficiency And Does Not Contribute To The Common Good.