“Over the next thirty years I came to realize that just as there is one way to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book. The chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book’s physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a love was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller.

The Fadiman family believed in carnal love. To us, a book’s words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictaed. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.”

Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris

I always like to have a book on hand (or in pocket) because you never know when those small moments of reading may strike. But lately I’ve been so overwhelmed, I can’t even carry around a full size book. I’ve been carry around Ex Libris – a small book of essays about books. In the past few days I’ve managed to carve a moment here or there to read a couple of them. The passage above is by far my favorite so far.

I am, it seems, the former – though part of me wishes to be the latter. I may not be quite as fastidious as the chambermaid, but I don’t really write in my books. I mean, I love a good used book, it’s just that I can never bring myself to write in them myself.