Signature

Bibliophile: a lover of books.

I should have seen it coming. As a young child sitting silently on the church pew I discovered an exposed string on page 17 of my triple combination's Book of Mormon. I continued to flip through the pages and found several more methodically exposed strings. Deep analysis ascertained my book was composed of 21 chunks of folded pages and the strings were dead center in each one. Many years later Chris McAfee, the bookbinding teacher at BYU, taught me those chunks are called signatures. Books are built from signatures.

Elise Lambson, a childhood friend who just wrapped up her Masters in Library and Information Science at Syracuse, posted these pro-book quotes in a Kindle vs. Hardcover facebook battle:

And leafing through old books we sometimes find
A dark, oracular phrase is underlined.
You once were here, but in time out of mind.1

Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times? As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells, and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower, both strange and familiar.2

If it's to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible...it should be...smelly.3

I love good books and I love a well-made book. I love a curved spine and Florentine endpapers. I love my first edition I Capture the Castle with its jaggedy, uneven signatures and embossed castle on the cover. (Frenchie scored me that beauty on eBay.) I love the gilded edges of my scriptures. I inhale book glue and I am equal parts entertained and grateful when a permanent ribbon bookmark is discovered post-purchase. It is akin to finding a toy in the bottom of the cereal box. Surprise! 

One book beats all. 

The Book of My Life rested wide open at the end of a chapter for years and years. And then more years. I maxed that chapter out. I scribbled notes in every margin, highlighted special words and broke them into bits of etymology, and memorized each new paragraph's indent. The last page of that chapter began to smell musty. I was getting old and the page was growing mildew spots.

Then Archer came. Holding him in my arms with curled hair, dewy makeup, and a pain-free lower half was a hallucination, a dream, the footage of someone else's home movie. It wasn't real.

[one day later]

At four o'clock in the morning my drafty hospital gown and I hobbled into the bathroom to change the mini mattress I had been sitting on. Archer was strengthening his lungs in his plastic box a few feet away because the nursery was full and I insisted he not partake of a binky. He was screaming bloody murder, my locks were lopsided and mostly flattened, and I was blinking mascara flakes onto my unwashed face as I squinted under one horrid florescent light. Sleepy, weepy, and acutely aware of my seventeen stitches was the exact moment I felt the page finally turn in my book. I was in new territory. I had not read this part. It was real. I dog-eared it.

Good thing I crimped that corner because it's so far back now. The pages are a blurred express.

Dizzy whizzing of text and images; high contrast moving too fast to focus on. RE leaves home in four years. Archer is already crawling. How long will my parents be alive? We will pack up and leave this house for another. Comings and goings, lovings and losings. The sprawling motion of time literally flying by.

This chapter smells divine, like the heavy air in a greenhouse. Whiffs of baby shampoo, teenage bronzer, and bergamot scent the pages. I love this chapter but it's going too fast. Do I savor it or do I study it? It will kill me if I don't remember this beautiful chunk. I want to underline it all but can't find the time so I press a baby sock and a note from RE between two pages. Stay safe, symbols. Preserve me.

Life is fleeting and darting every which way; I don't know how to leave my mark on it. I don't know how to put my signature on this signature. 

1 quoted in Inkdeath from "Improvisations of the Caprisian Winter" by Rainer Maria Rilke

2 Mo in Inkspell, by Cornelia Funke)

3 the words of Rupert Giles (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame)