books for babies

[metaphortunate]

Oh, bookstores. We've had some good times together, you and I, haven't we? Half Price Books in Houston, I remember so many long afternoons spent hidden in your stacks reading and rereading your strangely complete Dykes To Watch Out For collection. I apologize for never buying a one of them, but I was still living at home; books about lesbians were not really something I could have owned back then. God knows I bought plenty of other books from you, though. Stars Our Destination in Chicago, how I remember the long ride up to the north side of the city to go to my first Friends of Lulu meeting in you. I remember musing on the message of the change Alice Bentley had made to the title of Bester's book. Dear bookstores. I will miss you when you go. Stars Our Destination is gone already. Dreamhaven is barely open. Alan Beatts of Borderlands sees the writing on the wall.

But I know you are going, dear bookstores, because no one loves you more than me, and even for me, the one and only reason at this point why I ever shell out extra cash and storage space for a physical book over an e-book is the Junebug.

The Junebug is why I sometimes grit my teeth and close my Kindle window and resign myself to not reading a book until that day maybe weeks or months from now until I find the time to get by a bookstore - if the bookstore even has the book I want, which it probably won't, and Amazon temptingly always does, literally 90 seconds away. See, I grew up in a forest of books. My parents' books surrounded me on all sides. There were the books I picked out from the library, sure, and occasionally even from bookstores, but there were also the ones that I never, ever would have chosen for myself, yet I read them and read them and learned so much because they were right there, in my bedroom, whenever I was bored. Ralph Waldo Emerson. The complete works of Lewis Carroll and the collected stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. The complete works of Oscar Wilde. David Copperfield. John Holt. 500 old copies of National Geographic. I never would have chosen them for myself. If I had had to ask my parents to borrow them, I probably wouldn't have: how could I have justified it? I didn't have a reason, I didn't really know what I was reading, if god forbid there were any SEX in the book and my parents had asked me why I was reading it I would have died of modesty. But there was no barrier to entry for these books, none at all. And so I was rich.

How can I make that happen for the Junebug with e-books? I need a way. ("Never buy anything with DRM on it" is not a realistic way.)

Comments

[veejane]

I identify very strongly with book-as-object. Not only because I picked out books from my mother's shelves at random*, but because so many of them were acid-paper paperbacks, doomed to delicacy, and that informed how I read them and how I treated them. When I got into my mid-20s and had some disposable income, I replaced a bunch of my dilapidated paperbacks with glossy new hardcovers, but not all. Brat Farrar is still a sad little broken-spined thing, held together by a sparkly gold ponytail holder circa 1989. I read it very carefully.

I also don't have a handle on how inheritance would work in ebooks. I have many books with inscriptions, in handwriting, that commemorate the giver, recipient, and event of the giving. Some of these came to me, and I've already passed them on to niecephews. Some of them came to kin of mine, and I'm keeping them for future generations. The physicality of that, the fact that my grandmother's Latin-English dictionary circa 1920 is her copy, not anybody else's copy, though yea it be old and currently wrapped in Saran Wrap for safekeeping -- I don't yet understand how/whether that will translate to digital format.

(*And while we're providing Titles We Discovered By Chance, Possibly in Secret, memorable choices included a collection of Anais Nin short stories -- terrible all of them, and very exciting even so --, the first 100 pages of East of Eden, and Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts.)