Thread by @doctorow

I love books. I have many, many thousands of books. I was a bookseller and a library worker. I write books. I am typing these words in my backyard hammock as the sun rises, and scattered around me on the ground are ELEVEN books that I'm in the midst of reading.

1/

I love books as objects for delivering type to my eyeballs; long-form reading is SO much easier with print, despite my worsening visual disability. Reading on a screen is haunted by the omnipresent fact that one tap away is a Tiktok video of a guy shoving a lemon up his nose.

2/

But I also love books as artifacts: old pulps redolent of the moisture they've absorbed, bus transfers and pawn tickets hidden in their pages; beautiful first editions, unwieldy art-books with heavy, clay-coated stock. I just LOVE books.

3/

I have an especial soft spot for really FANCY books, limited-edition hardcovers. @beehivebks has done astounding work producing super-deluxe slipcased, hardcover editions of public domain classics:

pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/rev…

4/

But long before Beehive arrived on the scene, The @FolioSociety was turning out these stupendous, mouth-watering editions of new and old literary classics. They're pricey, but if I ever spot one at a used story (@IliadBookshop is a frequent source), I snap it up.

5/

The latest from The Folio Society is a $745 (!), four volume (!) slipcased edition of the complete short fiction (!) of Philip K Dick (!), introduced by Jonathan Lethem (!), limited to 750 hand-numbered copies (!).

foliosociety.com/usa/the-comple…

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The books include 24 original illustrations by 24 artists, including Dave McKean, Georgia Hill, Hilary Clarcq and many, many others.

7/

This set is too rich for my blood, to be honest, but just watching the videos describing the production was profoundly satisfying to me.





eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/04/06/dig…