"why are the pages so filled with so many words?"
ac writes: about the permanency of the book-object as an aesthetic. an addition to the conversation about the decline of literacy and 'book-tok'.
*note for new substack users, underlined text is a link that you click*
if you haven’t seen it, a content creator on TikTok has sparked quite a flame for complaining that Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows has, as quoted in the title, too many words. though i envy your naiveté, i encourage you to click the link and, if you’re feeling adventurous, maybe scroll through some of the replies. the internet is in an outrage.
when i first watched this video, i, too, felt disappointment and anger. how is it that we have reached such a stage in our development as a species that books with ‘too many words’ are brushed to the side in favor of novels that might not pass the Bechdel test? now, i am a romance fan (and i know this is not exclusive to the romance genre). i’ve read my fair share of novels with cartoon drawings of a couple on the front, and i eagerly pick up each Emily Henry book as she releases it. but why are we being scared off by books with smaller print, thinner pages, and detail?
what makes this all the more enticing is that despite this rapid increase in conversation about the “de-intellectualization” of readers on social media, James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes and Noble, states that physical books are being purchased more, attributed in his opinion to the rise of “BookTok.” well, of course it is! now, more than ever, reading is not just a hobby or a way to spend a rainy afternoon, but a lifestyle.
allow me to paint a picture:
you see a girl reading on the subway, messy hair and last night’s mascara smudged carelessly under her eyes. she’s focused on the text in her hands: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. there is a “type” that comes to mind. this girl probably listens to music you’ve never heard of, or classics that have since died out. she is the living epitome of the ‘it’ girl and she has no idea. now, swap Plath for any romance novel in the last five years with a either garishly cartoon or moderately vulgar cover. Shirtless men, sexualized women, the whole nine yards. I would argue that your interpretation of the same girl would differ. what we read has become yet another way to distinguish ourselves from the masses.
in her essay, “booktok may have lost the plot, but lit girls haven’t,” Substack writer Hannah Connolly explains this concept, that of the esteemed literary ‘it girl’ aesthetic, quite well. Connolly writes:
she’s chic; she’s beautiful; she owns a t-shirt that says ‘reading is hot’. she drinks merlot at dinner parties; she loves talking about which perfume she’d pair with each of her favourite books (jo malone’s pomegranate noir is obviously ‘the bell jar’ coded). her world is painted in shades of monochrome; she studied an arts subject and writes gut-wrenching fiction about the fragility of being ‘a girl’ in the modern world. her whole schtick is intellectualism; she thinks she was born in the wrong decade. and – as helena aeberli points out in her brilliant essay ‘in search of cool’ – she’s not real.
there is no literary ‘it’ girl. she may be who we all desire, but she is a creation. an aesthetic created to make us feel like we should be reading and looking good while we do it.
however, what this brings to mind, at least for me, is that it doesn’t matter what we are actually reading, but what we look like we’re reading. a book has become an accessory — an object, rather than an art form. yet, there is an inherent connection between book-object and the text it contains, because while the text is the actual focus of the publication and the reason for the object, reading is an inherently visual task. As Ruby Granger says in her YouTube video: “You can’t have the text without the book-object.”
this is not a new concept! dating back to some of the earliest publications, books have been (and, I would argue, used to be MORE) concerned with the visual aesthetic of the pages on which the text is written. The primary example that comes to me is William Morris. Morris was both a textile designer and a writer and showed active disdain for the decline in decorative books due to mass production. His publications combined both art and literature, as seen below in his novel A Dream of John Ball, and, A King’s Lesson (1886):
during my time at college, many of my literature classes would take us on a ‘field trip’ to the Special Collections in our library, and there was always a focus on how the physical features of the book, colored writing as seen in Morris, illustrations, and binding all contributed to what the book was. interestingly, other writers and publishing houses extending into the twentieth century sought to emulate Morris’ technique, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Will O’ the Mill published by Roycroft Press in 1901 or the Random House 1931 publication of H.G. Wells The Time Machine. some of these were viewed to be “a pale imitation of Morris,” but the point stands. we have always had a focus on the book-object accompanied by a focus on the text.
there is nothing wrong with an interest in aesthetic when it comes to literature, an opinion that i know many on social media do not agree with. it has always been an important facet of the reading experience, and i suspect it always will be. however, the debate is age-old as well. John Milton, for example, went blind before writing one of (again, in my opinion) the greatest works in the world: Paradise Lost. it was said about Milton that because he was blind, he was not distracted by the visual world, thus heightening the impact and intellect of both himself and the writing he produced. the idea is thus created that those of us who are distracted by the visual world are less likely to achieve Milton’s prowess. i mean, i’m not expecting to write the next Paradise Lost anytime soon, but a negative relationship is still formed between the visual and the mental.
so, i’ve presented to you an abundance of ideas in the first portion of this essay: the book-object is bad! the book-object is good! there’s always been this debate!
i expect that you’re thinking, “ac what the hell are you even adding to this conversation?” here is my answer:
there is a necessary value in the beauty of book-objects, separate from the text they contain. personally, i own two copies of both Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847) and Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847) due to the beauty of the editions, and i have no shame in admitting that i would probably sell my first born child to receive the entire Penguin’s Clothbound Covers Collection. in the Early Modern period, female readers would display that a book had importance to them by re-binding their favorite novels, which Heidi Hackel notes in her work Reading Material in Early Modern English (2005). even women such as Queen Elizabeth I participated in this; the queen was known for her decadent, embroidered book bindings.
owning a stunning copy of a novel that you love shows importance, and it dates back to some of the earliest English Literature. it allows the reader to not only take in the content of the text but also, to a certain extent, personalize what you prefer that book to look like.
as Hamlet says, though, “ay, there’s the rub.” the real beauty and appreciation of multiple editions, book collecting, even rebinding your favorite books to achieve the ‘aesthetic’ you desire is, in my opinion, only achievable when you are actually taking in the text contained within this book-object.
let me take us to a place of linguistics, specifically the Swiss linguist Saussure. his theory of language split a word or “sign” into two concepts: the “signified” and the “signifier.” the signified is the concept, which the image in our head that is produced by the signifier, or the phonic. by combining the phonic (or ‘sound image’ as Saussere states) and the mental picture of what that phonic represents, we get the “sign” or “word” (they are interchangeable). now, if you look at the details of Saussure’s writing, this comparison does not necessarily hold up, but the rudimentary idea is similar.
in my analysis, the book-object, its cover and illustrations, is the signified, the visual image of what we are about to read. the text of the novel is the signifier, the physical phonics contained within that image. when we place the book-object and the text together we get our “sign,” the book in totality. and removing one part of this ‘equation’ (written below) disrupts the entire process.
sign (word/book) = signifier (phonic/text) + signified (image/book-object)
so yes, we cannot have a book without the elaborate, detailed covers we covet. BUT, we also cannot have it without the text inside. if you cannot, or will not, take in the content contained within your stylish new Barnes and Noble purchase, you have not purchased a book. instead, you have purchased a token. there is no book without the language it contains.
i believe that we, as a social media and aesthetic obsessed culture, have lost this notion. rather than focus on the cover AND the text, we have drifted to focus primarily on just the object. it is one thing to buy a beautiful copy of your favorite novel, but it is the point of this essay that so many people are buying novels BECAUSE of the cover and not appreciating or critiquing what it contains. that’s why everyone is so enraged over one girl complaining that a book has “too many words,” because without the words, we do not have the book.
we buy and buy these adorable “instagrammable” book covers to look cool or make our social media feed look more ‘aesthetic,’ but we neglect one half (if we’re following the Saussure analogy) of the book itself: what is inside. there is definitely a whole follow up essay i could write about how this contributes to capitalism because, you know, everything does, but i will keep it simple. we are buying, but (it seems) we are not reading.
the world is defined by the words that describe it. without text, we would have nothing to describe ourselves, our language, or the world we live in. there is no problem with placing emphasis on the cover or the ‘vibe’ of the book if you are also consuming the text that it contains. if you aren’t reading it, then the meaning, the beauty of what it means to own, read, and understand literature is lost.
we are nothing without the words that we have, and i sincerely hope that the discourse surrounding this supposed rise in ‘anti-intellectualism’ prompts modern readers and social media ‘book influencers’ to pick up their novels, crack the spine of the beautiful cover of their book, and take a chance on the text within.
just like buying/displaying a record just cause it's got cool album art. remember that covid instagram trend of people reposting that bill clinton meme with their own "favorite" albums in it. i think we were all a biiit guilty of being swayed by aesthetic when we posted/discussed those.