Monday, Sep 8, 2008
The shelf called "Unique Gifts for the Reader" in B&N is mostly stocked with items that are impractical or have nothing to do with reading: a snow globe with Santa inside, photo albums, rubber stamps, glorified blank books ("Millennium Notebook"), kitty-cat photos you can display on your computer, a Shakespeare paperweight in a package that explains, for those serious readers who may not know, who Shakespeare was. An author friend of mine was recently given a rubber stamp reading, "Outside of a dog, a book is a woman's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." Other gifts are ostentatiously useful for some all-but-unnecessary purpose: Book Gear USA makes an eyeglass case that straps to your book and a protective cover so you can "take your reading with you" -- as if such a thing would be impossible without this special product. The covers also provide "reading privacy," which of course you need only if you're reading something of which you are ashamed. There are jumbo-size Book Gear covers for the Bible.
A display case labeled "Gifts for Readers Collection" includes bookmarks of all kinds, many of them storybook or television tie-ins. Wishbone the television dog has a bookmark on which he poses atop a stack of classics: He has chosen "Oliver Twist," "Don Quixote," "The Prince and the Pauper," "The Odyssey" and "Joan of Arc" -- all tales of adventure, with the odd exception of "Silas Marner," a book that has doubtless made generations of children hate George Eliot. "Wishbone wants you to know that dogs and books are everyone's best friends," says the back.
These bookmarks are clearly intended for children, and it's natural to want to buy readerly paraphernalia as a way of encouraging children to read -- they're rewards for and enticements to reading for people who are just learning to do it. If Bugs Bunny enjoys it, it's probably pretty cool, and a neato Wishbone bookmark can't be used unless you've got a book to mark your place in.
But what, then, are we to make of the bookmarks featuring Anne Geddes' famous baby photographs, sunset seascapes or sexy pictures of Elvis Presley? They have neither the nostalgic intellectual cachet of the inquisitive gargoyle bookends nor the childish appeal of Bugs. And in the age of paperbacks, now that people own books more than borrow them from libraries and are free to dog-ear the pages, the bookmark has hardly any purpose. Plus, a Post-it note works better anyway, because it doesn't fall out. Why do people buy bookmarks? It must be for their symbolic representation of readerliness, construed in this case not as "worldly" and "serious" but as cute (Geddes), romantic (sunset) or hip (Elvis). The bookmark suggests not only a desire to identify as a reader but also a reverence for books, a respect for their totemic power. Odd as it may be to convey that reverence by means of a photo of a baby dressed as a giant cabbage, people are doing it.
But even though readerly reverence can explain most of the kitsch I've come across, there's still a problem here: Many of the products seem to be about pretending you read a kind of book that you very likely do not (Shakespeare, Chekhov) instead of relishing whatever genuinely thrills you. Celebrating reading is good. Taking pride in doing something you love is good, whether it's through a cabbage-baby bookmark or the Oxford English Dictionary. But if you read Piers Anthony or Georgette Heyer, and you're buying Shakespeare busts, old-globe calendars and Lewis Carroll collectibles as a way of showing your pride in reading, then there's a lot of shame mixed in with that pride. There's an idea that reading Chekhov shows you are serious and worldly and that that's more valid than being romantic, or fantastical, or quick to laugh -- that only one kind of academy-sanctioned taste is worth celebrating.
Books are usually perceived as benevolent and harmless compared with the terrors of gangsta rap lyrics, Internet bomb recipes and television sitcoms, so the "serious reader" conceives herself as rejecting the media blitz in favor of old-fashioned aesthetics, if not values. But books, too, can provide vapid entertainment, corrupt young minds and perpetuate short attention spans and stereotypes. In short, although nostalgic reading paraphernalia paint books as the last gasp of a pre-media-saturated world, books have always been the media, and they always will be.
Reading kitsch is very often useless. It can perpetuate shame in its idealization of "worldly" and canonical taste, and it belies the book industry's complicity in our media glut. Nonetheless, as I was working on this essay my mother bought me little copper-colored "page points" from Levenger (to mark my place in things I read), and I was forced to admit that I like them. They are pleasing, and they allow me to demonstrate care for books I might ordinarily underline or dog-ear. And they go nicely with my old-fashioned letter box, which has special drawers for envelopes and stamps and makes me feel nostalgic for the good old days of letter writing. I admit, I have a framed poster advertising a rare edition of "Frankenstein" on my study wall, and a picture by noted illustrator Arthur Rackham -- both "collectibles," and symbols of my reading tastes. But I also have a page from a "Catwoman" comic, a business card ostensibly signed by Sherlock Holmes, a magazine photo of a porcupine fish and another of Deborah Harry.
I've kitsched up my office not only with symbols of my academy-sanctioned interest in 19th century novelists and early 20th century illustrators, but also with emblems of the other things I read: detective stories, comics, magazines about beautiful women and wildlife. My monthly copy of Vogue gets read long before Lingua Franca, and I am not ashamed. I am a Conan Doyle fan, hear me roar. And Cynthia Heimel has made me giggle since I was 16 years old -- where is my Heimel paperweight?
When they make tchotchkes for her -- not just for Chekhov and Shakespeare, but kitsch for readers of Heimel, Heyer, Anthony and Doyle -- then maybe we'll truly be celebrating reading, rather than some exalted idea of a virtuous, scholarly hobby. A reading life deserves representation in all its complexity -- its commercialism as well as its intellectualism, its shallowness as well as its depth, its entertainment value as well as its profundity.
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