After singing the praises of the electronic tablet, I’m having serious doubts. I just finished reading the novel Eureka Street from a worn New York Public Library (NYPL) paperback, and much of the pleasure of that was having the soft saggy thing with me all week. Feeling its weight at the bottom of my handbag as I crossed the street, and laying it across my lap on the subway each morning gave great comfort. Acquired by the library in 1999, shortly after it was published, this book is handsomely worn. Its pages have darkened around the edges, as if tea-stained, and remain luminous along the spine. Its glued binding is so supple that it lies open to any page it’s set down at. The book bears witness to the transition from the old mechanical NYPL check-out system to the new computerized one; there’s a manilla pocket fixed to the inside cover where librarians used to stick a card stamped with the book’s due date. Now librarians tuck a curling silvery receipt somewhere inside, from where it falls the moment the book is cracked open, leading almost inevitably to overdue fines.
This is an old but clean book: there are no markings or food stains inside, which are things I can’t bear in library books. But page 62 is dog-eared to mark a previous reader’s place just before he fell asleep and tossed the book to the ground, and a computerized check-out slip, its print gone ghostly pale, was left lying face-up on page 127 to mark where another reader gave up late in the summer of 2002. It’s too bad, because I’m sure that if she had reached Chapter 10, the heart of the novel, which breaks out into a heartfelt, lyrical ode to the city of Belfast, she would have read on until the end. And this is another pleasure of reading from a library book – the feeling of reading along with others, with those countless anonymous library patrons who have moved through the same pages before. Perhaps they chose it for the same reasons I did (a romantic interest in Ireland and a literary interest in the comic novel). Perhaps they laughed out loud at the same places I did (the satire of an old-school country poet who writes endlessly about hedges and spades, and names his new collection Rejected Poems, 1965-1995). And perhaps they paused to soak in the same turn of phrase that I did (“The city sounded like an old record that fizzled and scratched.”) Eureka Street is an eccentric book, with passages of comedy, romance, lad-lit, action and reverie mixed up in one another, all of it stuffed inside a ragged pile of newsprint.
