On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores

Book Open and Closed

31 Book Open and Closed That is why the book opens and closes, why its being a(s) book, its precarious and dazzling truth, resides in the internal conjunction and disjunction of that alternation: it opens and closes on the unique character whose tracing it contains. Hence it presents two aspects that are intimately dependent on each other: it is stitched and bound, it holds together as a body and forms a volume (that is the sense of the ancient volumen, the scroll that could be rolled around or unrolled from a core of wood or metal, ivory, reed, or bone), but at the same time it is discontinuous and a sheaf of leaves, the codex of stitched pages whose consistency only ever holds together by a thread. There was already codex in the volumen, just as there remains something of the latter in the former. That is also why the book has two postures and two aspects: the volume that is put away and the volume that is open. On the one hand, the book noticed by the spine of its cover, its pages limited to the slice of their compact thinness; and, on the other hand, the open book with slightly raised pag- 32 es, a finger sometimes slipped in ready to turn to the next one. These two books are both the same and not the same. As soon as one opens it, the first book loses the almost mute assurance of its compact consistency and its upright stance. It can no longer stand alone and no longer has, with its fellows, the appearance of an alignment, row, column, or flush stack of freshly cut bricks. It loses the superb and laconic stature of a cover that appears to tell it all, or better still, transmute it into a unique, homogeneous and nonanalyzable substance. Substance, subordinate,4 or subject, such was the closed book, that is to say, the book that is done, published, exposed, communicable, ready for selling or reading: cover, binding, title, author , publisher; there we have a subject, a particular agent. La Chartreuse de Parme, by Stendhal, Grenoble, Éditions Transalpines. The modes of stitching and binding, paper quality—tint, thickness , grain—also belong to that substantiality, as does the cover design, its colors, motifs, sometimes its images, the external as well as internal typography, the design and size of its fonts, its format, composition, running heads, its recto pag- 33 es, correction of every sort of typo, so many discrete (and discreet) traits, whose totality derives from nothing other than an Idea or Character, a Typic Form that subsumes all the typographies, typologies, and characterologies implied in the publication of this volume. This subordinate, confected and fashioned by the publisher, mockup designer , copyeditor, and printer, refers each time, in one way or another, to the Idea of the Book itself, to some monumental Bible, some Koran with giltedged pages, some virgin Volume of Mallarmé, as well as to the sometimes severe, sometimes variegated look of the rows of volumes on bookshelves, collections, series, classifications by author, genre, period, to the whole taxonomy by means of which the Idea of a universal library or bookstore—and in the manner of the universe itself, every set that is finite and in infinite expansion—seeks to organize , if not to represent itself. For it is on these shelves that the book is in fact exposed for the first time. On these shelves or display tables, these display stands or cabinets, in these windows as well, these bookcases, lofty fur- 34 nishings where one’s gaze can just discern the titles on the top shelf. The library or bookstore—as we know, they used to be the same thing—is nothing but the Idea of the book as exposed substance, as subject that shows and presents itself. Here the book pronounces its ego sum, ego existo, and, in consequence, also its cogito. It is the very substance of itself, its whole nature consisting in its relation to itself and in its obedience to its own law, to the law of what is proper to it (its character, idea, form, style, motion, and emotion . . . ). From that it follows that the bookstore is a place where what is exhaled, and perhaps even exalted , in a very particular manner, is this regime or climate of monstration, exhibition [montre] or monstrance, the exposition and ostention that is in force in...