Books: More Than Words
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Books are more than pages bound by a cover. When a reader turns the pages what do they unleash?
It was an absolute treat to speak to a packed room of awesome Con attendees for our panel “Ancient Grimoires, Occult Texts, and Dusty Tomes: The Book as Object in Speculative Fiction” at Can-Con SF 2017. I had the honour of participating alongside NY Times Bestseller author Michelle Sagara, author and fighting coach Erik Buchanan, author and professor-historian Evan May. Aurora Award winner and Canadian fantastika collector Peter Halasz moderated the panel.
Our panel opened with a discussion about books as repositories of power. Historically, not everyone could read and write – not even, as Ms. Sagara pointed out, royals who signed laws into government. Books were a way to control people through the transmission and comprehension of written knowledge.
Secrets, too, lie within written pages, with cryptic messages only meant for those with the key (or ability) to decode the cipher. Peter suggested that nothing that is written down is secret, for even a coded message can be decoded – eventually. Of course, there are famous examples of lost ciphers and written secrets that have yet to be solved. The Voynich Manuscript came up as a cardinal case – including that it has, yet again, not really been solved.
Older texts with bound pages provide lots of secret hidey-hole places in the physical structure of the book. Although it didn’t come up during the panel, the most obvious of these is when a book functions as a container (hollow cover or cut out pages for a gun, money, or a whiskey flask come to mind).
An increase in literacy shifted political power to the common person, thanks, in part, to a revolution in technology. In 1439, the Gutenburg Press placed the wisdom of ancient philosophers, of gardening principals of Roman Catholic monasteries (which informed all formal Western gardens for centuries), and the doctrine of religion directly into the hands of the middle and upper classes. Literacy spread and power shifted with it, with more people able to rise above poverty than ever before.
Poignantly, as fiction proliferated, readers were able to carry worlds with them. Ms. Sagara shared her personal, intimate association with books. They are a place into which a reader can escape, a world designed for the reader alone. On her website, Ms. Sagara states, “Reading itself is entirely about the reader.” Fiction shuts out the outside world and physically transports readers into its pages. Digital eReaders lets readers carry “an abundance of worlds in their back pocket.” Of course, narratives might portray books as physical portals, or containing keys to said portals.
An audience member touched upon the risk of losing books as objects within stories with the digital revolution. I think all the panelists agreed that the nature of reading and storytelling are eternally linked with being human, and whether we derive our content from a digital or printed page comes down, in part, to personal choice. That is also reflected in narratives. Characters in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians use both books and internet search engines to find the knowledge for their spells and charms. The Laundry Files by Charles Stross blends the digital and magical worlds.
Books (and by extension, libraries) can be objects of containment, of power or secrets, and may be agents of change for both the individual or a society (with both good and disastrous consequences). Where there is power in the written word, there is also power in the exclusion of something being written down. Such was the case with the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E. and the Gnostic Texts, and missing Gospels. There were several occult magazines and guilds in the Victorian era, but the study of the occult didn’t become wide-spread (at the time) despite the proliferation of written information.
That which is excluded becomes discredited or forbidden knowledge.
In fiction specifically, books can be characters with either some, none, or all of the answers that protagonists seek. They can also raise ghosts and demons. An audience member contributed the following thought: A grimoire is a book of recipes, a magical cook book, if you will. The spellbooks themselves are neither good nor bad. The intended use of those ingredients by the reader / practitioner of the occult determines the positive or negative outcome. While the panel didn’t come to a universal consensus, we pretty much agreed that it brought a whole new meaning to the name “Hell’s Kitchen.”
The topics we discussed bounced around a little bit, as panel discussions with open audience participation can do. One of the topics was books as works of art like the illuminated manuscript The Book of Kells in Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Besides insisting that people put the Book of Kells on their bucket list, I added that when I go to libraries, they feel like visceral entities, each one having a unique soul influenced by the experiences that library has had over time. Interestingly, an audience member found me in the vendors’ room afterwards and told me of an article about killer libraries. Seriously – toxic fumes and all.
In my summary comment, I added one more detail for thought: most books (all??) come with entourage – the person who crafted the words, did the calligraphy, drew the illustration, inked the picture, and bound the pages. There are real and imaginary book guardians (archivists) and warriors (sellers). No book exists in isolation.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]