Hidden riches: Olivia Laing's copy of Madame Bovary
To admit that a book is a covetable object in itself, contents aside, is to risk exposing oneself to the sort of (mistaken) approbation heaped upon Gatsby by that owl-eyed interloper to his library, who expressed surprise that the books were real, 'pages and everything', rather than the 'nice durable cardboard' he had expected to find. What, after all, is more repellent, more eloquent of fakery, than a library that isn't read, that is instead an element of set design? To buy a book for its cover is to risk the worst charges of superficiality, of point-missing on a grand scale. Nonetheless, I like a pretty book. As such, I could barely contain my excitement at the news that Virago is releasing a limited run of Modern Classics with covers designed by female artists - Orla Kiely, Cath Kidston and the like - to celebrate their 30th birthday
There is a rush at present to repackage the past. Though we rarely review classic books in the Observer, we keep a shelf aside for them, and the latest offering from Persephone or Capuchin rarely goes unattended. I confess to taking a deep delight in these books: the dove grey binding of the Persephones, the ranked forest-green spines of Viragos. The latter inevitably recall my mother, whose library of masculine Penguins - Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and so forth; relics, along with us children, of a brief marriage - was augmented through the early eighties with Radclyffe Hall, Vita Sackville-West and Molly Keane. Catching sight of those green spines with their nibbled apples to this day transports me back to childhood with the same aching rush of nostalgia as hearing Cyndi Lauper from a passing car stereo.
But if the cover alone can have so powerful an effect, how much more potent the spell once the book is opened. A few weeks ago, at a car boot sale a stone's throw from Arundel Castle, I came across a box of books dating from between 1940 and 1970. Most I already owned or did not care for, but I bought them all the same, compelled by nosiness and sentiment. I coveted what the books contained: not so much the words on the page as the notes they bristled with. These were used books in the truest sense: foxed, begrimed and thoroughly well read. To open any one of them is to become drawn into the most private of conversations: that which takes place between a book and its reader.
The notes are written in pencil and biro on the back of envelopes, KitKat wrappers, maps and letters, in a hand at once elegant and painfully small. Like all found objects, they possess a glamour. On them, my unknown reader (Catholic, educated, male) has transcribed those moments on his voyage through the book that moved him, that troubled or provoked him. What remains, outliving its reader, is a palimpsest of thought, a magpie's nest composed of scraps of quotation and odd moments of plot, a nest that is, to my mind, stuffed higgledy-piggledy with stolen jewels.
Madame Bovary, the most heavily annotated book in the collection, fascinates me. A piece of paper has been secreted at the back that bears the single melancholy question: 'Why did I get married?' Does it belong to Madam Bovary or to the reader himself? Did their mutual unhappiness chime and coincide, or is this merely the note taking of a diligent student? Elsewhere, the reiteration of phrases has something of the odd, ungainly beauty of William Burroughs's experiments with cut-up. 'Black, butterflies, white butterflies' reads one note; on another, 'The dreams had fallen - like wounded swallows in the mud.' In these scissored fragments, these resonant phrases, I find the ideas, the very words, that had someone, at some time, in thrall. Just reading them gives me a strange reciprocal thrill. We leave ourselves in books, of that there is no doubt.
