Apex Book Company

I was going to tell you about the Titanic Omar, but instead I got to thinking about the things Hollywood does to books, and about the forty-five-degree angle, and that led to my bath habits, and–

Let me explain. The forty-five-degree angle first. It’s quite simple. When you take a valuable book in your hands – imagine one of those large eighteenth-century leather-bound books, for instance, but this applies equally to a hyper-modern (as they are called) fantasy first edition – you must never open it at an angle greater than forty-five degrees. Anything over that level could potentially damage the spine or the binding. Simple.

Sounds anal? You bet your ass it does. But it’s also the only way to handle a book, which is to say, gently and with a lot of respect. Now, I know book dealers who, when you bring them books to sell, will immediately – I am not kidding – spread it wide open, with the kind of decisive, no-nonsense clinical approach, to see, as one told me, “Whether the binding was sound.” If the book croaks, they don’t buy it, and you might as well put the book out of its misery. Burn it, perhaps. Or bury it, which is an old Jewish custom (usually only applying to religious texts, alas). If, however, it holds strong (rather like Rambo when he was caught by the Viet Cong), they might consent to buy it. Graciously.

I hate those book dealers.

A person who values books would hold them carefully, rather like a baby, only more so. They might use gloves (human sweat damages books) to handle the book. And they would never open it wider than forty-five degrees. So talking about tender loving care naturally leads us to Hollywood, and how they handle books on screen.

The classic example of this kind is, perhaps, the movie The Ninth Gate, based on Spanish author Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s best-selling novel, El Club Dumas. The Dumas Club (as the UK edition is called) is one of my favourite novels, a witty, literary novel about book collecting, the devil, and The Three Musketeers (another of my favourite books). As much as I love The Dumas Club, however, I’ve never been able to watch The Ninth Gate to the end, and there is a simple reason for it.

The Club Dumas, Random House

There is a scene, fairly early on, where Johnny Depp, who plays unscrupulous (as if there could be another kind! Ha!) book runner, Corso, is examining a book. It is a large, ancient, clearly valuable book. Depp’s method of examining the book is – in the no-nonsense-take-no-prisoners approach of the book dealer I previously mentioned (or, indeed, of Rambo) – to spread it open on the table at the full one-hundred-and-eighty degrees.

Ouch.

You could hear the book screaming from the last row of the theatre.

I could never watch past that point. The thought that a professional book dealer, an expert no less, could handle a book that way is preposterous. All suspension of disbelief leaves me at that moment.

Emmanuelle Seigner

Even Emmanuelle Seigner’s presence is not enough. I wonder how many aspiring book collectors had come out of the theatre, hormones charged, and went on to a literary murder spree of spine-breaking and mutilation. Texas Chainsaw Massacre? A Clockwork Orange? Platoon? They’ve got nothing on The Ninth Gate.

It might be worth terming this The Hollywood Butcher School of Book Handling, and it has some illustrious graduates, premier amongst them, Angelina Jolie, who does a good job of murdering hapless books in Tomb Raider, another case of someone-who-should-really-know-better. Never mind. Let Hollywood murder its set props. Just leave the real books alone.

But – real books? What is the point, you might (reasonably) ask, of a book you can’t open? Well, on that I am in complete agreement. What we have to understand is that book collecting is not always, or even often, or necessarily, about the contents of a book. A book, after all, can be read as an electronic file or, for that matter, written in crayon on the white walls of your bedroom (If your kids do that, should you ground them for life, or should you congratulate them on taking a stand on the open source model of book distribution and their courageous views on intellectual property rights? I know which I’d go for). To collect books, one must collect the physical object that is a book. And I’ll be talking about some rare and wonderful (and rather bizarre) physical manifestations of books in a future column. The important thing to realise – whether you agree with it or not – is that there are books to read, and books to keep.

From a collector’s point of view, at least.

Which leads me to my bathroom habits, where, in the privacy of the bath, I turn into my own version of a mask-wearing psycho and do horrible things to books.

I particularly like library books.

I like to read in the bath. I got the habit in London, where the long, cold winters (they last eleven and a half months of the year) require long, frequent baths – either that, or freezing. And so – books. £1 paperbacks from the charity shop. Library books on loan. Book catalogues (I love reading book catalogues, and if you’re not a collector you would never understand it, because it probably is the dullest thing in the world). I’d read the back of a matchbox if I had nothing else. And all my collector’s habits, all my concern for the well-being of books, just… disappear.

I wouldn’t go as far as to actually drop books in the bath. Or at least, that was an accident. Sorry. But I would come close to drowning them. I’ll leave wet handprints on the pages. I’ll fold corners to mark my place. I’ll kill bugs with them. I might even turn to them in the event of running out of toi – never mind (I’ll talk about some of the other uses of books later on). For me, reading-books are for reading. I’ll read them until there is nothing left but a horrible mutilated husk, expiring with a soft sigh of despair – and then I’ll give them to a charity shop.

Like everyone else does.

Lavie Tidhar writes weird fiction. This is his web site. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and lived in South Africa and the UK. Most recently he’s lived in the Banks islands of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, one of the most remote and isolated places on Earth. Lavie’s website is http://www.lavietidhar.co.uk/.

In 2007, Apex Publications released a collection of Jewish adventure stories titled HebrewPunk from Lavie Tidhar. This book is available as a direct order from the Apex Store and from the Apex aStore.