What is a book?

A book is a vessel for the thoughts we want to keep.

It is a storage device for the emotions and feelings, 

the love and hate,

the joy and sorrow,

the laughter and tears,

the heartache and heartbreak,

the sense, nonsense and scrambled indeterminacy 

by which we understand ourselves, our world and others in it.

A book is a shared community of ideas,

A gift to ourselves or a gift to others,

A way of not only stopping time but recording time at the point of that stoppage.

Above all else a book is all of those things that the thing that is not a book is not.

A book is an object by which we object.

A book is an object to counter the abject,

to counter the instant, the throwaway, the evaporating pixel, the missing links.

We put into the book the things we wish to preserve:

Objective, subjective, researched or imagined,

Dreamed up in an instant and toyed with for hours,

Played with, stayed with, laid with, laden with,

Layer upon layer of meaning and not meaning,

Page after page of endeavouring to mean.

A book is an endeavour,

A book is a journey,

A book takes us places that no boat can sail,

A book takes us places that no plane can land,

With a book in hand we visit terrains no motorised vehicle can traverse,

With a book in our hands we can be so much more than the book in our hands

Or the person we were before we picked up and read the book in our hands.

If we buy the books we want to read then writers can continue to write the books we will choose to keep. We can keep the books that we hold dear, the books we want to read again, to touch again, to see again, to remind ourselves of the words inside, the way we felt, the places we were, and may be again or the how we have changed. A book is a vessel for so much more than the words that are printed on the leaves it contains.

But a book is not words. 

Words are everywhere, bound or otherwise.

And words are always bound in some way.

Words may well be a glue that bind us together.

But the book is our record of that binding,

The book is our bond, our pact, our shared humanity.

This is not to belittle the words not in books,

The words that are spoken, the words we still share,

The words in our papers, magazines and pamphlets

The words on our websites, and blog posts and tweets.

If by such definition the book is subjective,

then your book may not be my book,

and some books will be no-ones book at all.

If the above is our starting point

Our books will still fly.

A book will always be so much more than object and content. The content cannot be fully content without the object that contains it and yet no object can contain the book and no book should be a container. The book is both thing, the thing it contains and everything else it inspires.

A cover should remind us of what is within, 

Our invitation to revisit,

Our point of reference,

A mark of reverence,

A way to code.

The pages and typeface should feel fit for purpose,

Should fit with the sentiments stored in the words,

They may well be unnoticed unless notice is wanted,

And if they are noticed they should add to the feeling.

A book should not be determined by length, word count, page count

Or countless other counts that should remain the domain of the accountant:

Always beyond the book.

What determines a book should be quality not quantity.

The intangible is not countable,

How much it makes shouldn’t count.

We must put in our books the things that we would never want to be tomorrow’s fish and chip paper, today’s dissolving pixel, yesterday’s reconsidered musings. The book is the synthesis, the edit, the abandoned end point of endless corrections, changes and modifications so that in the end it is the end of that particular journey: bound to bind that moment in time,

to keep,

to treasure,

time at once stopped but forever retained.

And this is not a book.

It wasn’t written for a book.

It was inspired by one book

But drew on many more.

If this has a purpose beyond the transient and fleeting,

the flippant and irreverent,

the thoughtful and little considered,

instant sound bite bytes,

then it would only be

as a request

to reflect 

for a moment 

the next time we make or make for a book, 

that we pause

and reflect

that we make with due care, 

that we select with attention, 

pick up with good intention,

read and write with reflection,

And keep because it means something.