Old Books that have found me
On my bookshelf – between the uniform beauty of the Penguin classics, the pocketbook-sized poetry collections and the hefty tomes of photography – lie six battered books from another continent, another lifetime. Apart from their tattiness, they share another detail: they were all put out by a publishing company called Signet during the 1960s. At the back of these books, a ‘further reading’ section advertises plodding novels that were mediocre then and which are forgotten now, while the modern reader can take a gamble by writing to their postal address, now presumably defunct, to see who replies, if at all. The introductions, when present, are written in the formality of a bygone era, something that sounds nice when listened to but clunky when read. The covers are dated, worn down by the years and old-fashioned art styles.
Details, details
There are other details to marvel at. Prices printed on the back are low, the essay competitions no longer open, and the bibliography is, by today’s standards, a compilation of outdated, past its sell-by-date references. A smell from the yellowing pages rises up, typical of old books, reassuring in its surprisingly pleasant mustiness. A lifeline might be handed to them; most modern-day studies show reading comprehension is hindered by screens, boosted by the page.
They have none of the lustre of a first edition; each one was simply the product of a moment in time, stemming from printers that existed before print-on-demand models. In a crazy, chaotic world, they managed to survive, the physical copies and the ideas within. Surviving as they have might be a minor miracle. On Reddit, I once read that a user’s college professor warned against buying their copies, citing poor ink and bad paper quality. But considering that the company is now owned by Penguin Random House, I can only assume that they didn’t have the worst reputation in the industry.
They came into my possession because my friend’s brother, a Spanish guy who had been learning English from a young age, wanted to get rid of them. After being Stateside in the 1960s, these books had lived a life in 1990s Madrid, and I could follow his pencilled notes and underlined passages in almost all of them, tracking what themes and words stood out, noticing where he gave up reading. By the 2015, they were donated to me rather than a shop, and they were ignored until 2019, when I turned to them, desperate to read something after going through everything else in the apartment. I was very close to reading the back of cereal boxes, imagining stories of love, violence and B Vitamins.
Chains of readers
The story behind the story. If almost every bank note has traces of cocaine, these books have the traces of each bookcase they have stood on, of where they rested as a reader fell asleep, the air particles from street to metro and metro to home, the hands that caressed and clenched, pages folded and unfolded, bookmakers placed and removed, the steam of teas and coffees, the rivets in the spine, that sign of reading, of multitudes of things.
So, faced with a Signet book or a box of Corn Flakes, I opted for the former and was not disappointed. Even the flawed ones said something, pointing to a naivete that was forgivable or, at the very least, interesting.
