I recently asked my sister how often she buys hardcover books and she shocked me by answering that she almost always does. She is too impatient to wait for the paperback edition, she says, and she often buys hardcovers for her children and as gifts. And hardcover books in the USA routinely cost over 20 dollars. I am three years older than my sister and a half-century stingier. I pay for hardbacks if I already love the text, or if they are second-hand, or if they are by Margaret Atwood. At my very first salaried job, my boss gave me Zodiac Press hardbacks of Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” and “Emma” for Christmas, with precise type and sketchy wash illustrations on the dust jackets. I knew then exactly what I wanted in life but, as a frugal friend delightfully puts it, my way is the hair-shirt way.
Now I’ve found a bookseller at Page 99 who patiently replies to my discursive emails and procured two books for me that were not on her list. I wanted hardcover editions of Dickens’s “Dombey and Son” and Nabokov’s “Lolita” printed in at least 10-point type. They came, wearing dust jackets as stylish as tuxedoes. I undressed them to find deep red cloth covers with black details. I ran my finger over the title etched in gilt on the spine. Also in gilt was the Everyman logo, a rising sun. A braided ribbon was sewn into the binding for a bookmark.
Don’t imagine I immediately cracked open their creamy pages. No, I had set my heart on enjoying those books while lounging on the lawn. Months ago I had bought and rehabilitated an old easy chair for this purpose. When my books arrived I covered them with a thick cellophane sheet so that they wouldn’t fray in my sweaty hands. I wrote my name and the year on the first page. Then I started reading.
My new “Dombey and Son”, containing many of Phiz’s illustrations, is successor to a Penguin paperback and a Wordsworth paperback. I read both paperbacks to shreds, but my new Everyman will stand up to years of tears over Florence Dombey and her implacable father.
“Lolita” too is about a girl and her ruthless father, in this case a surrogate. The novel is exuberant, immoral, playful, and funny. We cry out against that filthy animal the narrator but, faced with his brilliant prose, we must lie back and think of literature. Humbert Humbert is a widower who has a long affair with his 12-year-old stepdaughter. Like Emily Bronte or Mary Shelley or any writer telling an unbelievable story of monstrous behaviour, Nabokov frames his narrative in other narratives. Humbert’s manuscript is edited and introduced by a supposed psychologist appointed by Humbert’s supposed lawyer. Anything unbelievable in it can be chalked up to censorship, omissions, and lies. So we suspend disgust along with disbelief and follow this vile anti-hero to his apoplectic end, and the end of an incomparable love story.
anantharaman.bookwise@gmail.com
