This Modern Writer: Paging the How Its Beens by Chantel Tattoli

The writer is a reader first, even later on. To get in the mood of writing, I read. Which brings me to it:

Some tricks you can’t teach to Sleek Machines. That’s all I’m saying. Forget the ink and paper crowd versus the iPading/Kindling/Nooking technocrats, man, I’m just saying there are some things.

O, for leafing through. Moving over the sheets, pages tickling your fingertips. Or maybe it bites you, because who likes a mussing rough hand. And how bad are paper cuts? But you know there’s that masochism. And when fingers do find purchase on a page, it’s velvet.

The yellowed mustiness of vintage copies—like they’ve been hotboxed in cigar smoke. I can’t imagine reading Winesburg, Ohio any other way. The scarring: note bened with flowery stars, brackets, underscores so vigorous as to break through the taut page. The bruising: welts of red sauce and red wine—and what is that, is that vomit? (A best friend puked on my Dharma Bums.) The pages crinkle here, why, because it’s sad, because I cried here, right here. This one’s gold metallic banding blistered and popped, because a boyfriend put it in the microwave when it got wet. It got wet because I brought it on a john boat snorkeling.

Do yours ears dog? You can drop a book and it closes like a mouth shutting up, or it lands cracked open on its face—and well, that’s kind of superstitious, like maybe there’s something on either of those pages which you need to see. You can put your head in it. When you remember about-where a line or a passage is—on a left page, one of the first paragraphs—and resting your eyes on it, it’s right where you remembered it to be.

Between pages, you find old receipts and old notes, more paper trail. Sometimes I find leaves. There’s losing a page in the wind. There’s dedications to prior owners. There is the marginalia of prior owners. Those times when they underlined something that you love and would have underlined if they hadn’t already done it, and then it’s a threesome—you, the other reader, and the author.

Lending out a book is an act of love. The last page. The last sentence. You knew it would come. There’s hugging a just-finished book to your chest. You being bereft because you just lost some people, very dear.

Shelving: I curate my bookshelves by the color of the spines of the books. Yours too, if you would let me. Sections of hot roses and maroon; teal, navy, ultraseafoam; black/white; pale yellow, bright-bright sunshine; lavender to mauve… The spine of well-read books can look like laugh lines.

Whatever happens, I love how it’s been.