Under the Covers
Ros Thomas
The West Weekend Magazine
Published January 26, 2013
Section: Opinion

I learnt more about men and sex in 1985 than I should have, thanks to a book called The Hite Report. It was a fat well-thumbed paperback, containing interviews with hundreds of blokes on everything from ‘What Men like Women to Wear’ to ‘How A Man Likes to be Seduced.’ Its pages were coffee stained at juicy junctions, underlined and exclamation marked, and I discovered a silverfish entombed near the spine in a chapter devoted to Men’s Fantasies. (‘Stop talking’ featured heavily in the advice to women.)

I used to hide out with a girlfriend in a deserted corner of the University library, sitting on the floor between the compactors. There we would pore over the book we re-named ‘the boy bible’ absorbing every carnal secret: “Surely they can’t want us to do that?” If we were startled by approaching footsteps, we would slam our bible shut and in fits of giggles, jam it back into the shelf. That book sustained us through an entire semester of Psychology 100. I can still faintly remember the sweet woody scent of its yellowing pages.

Twenty years later, with the mysteries of marital relations (mostly) solved, I’ve made several attempts to rediscover a copy of The Hite Report on the internet or in second hand bookshops, but it’s out of print. Part of me desperately wants to be shocked anew, feel the weight of a thousand men’s desires in my hands. Like all books, that one transcends time: it is the only graspable remnant of my 17-year-old self, hungry to learn the ways of the world.

Such is the power of the book: the cleverness of minds printed onto leaves of pulped wood and sewn to leather bindings. Or bound and glued to a paperback spine. If asked to name what things I would be most devastated to lose, my book collection would top the list.

My life is bookended by the assorted volumes of other people’s imaginations in print. It began with the Golden Books read to me as a toddler in the 1970’s, every one of them saved by Mum in her longings for grandchildren. My small daughter and I now read those slim little board-books with the same wonder. For me, the illustrations are instantly recognisable even after forty years of living have got in the way.

Enid Blyton, the Famous Five and the fantasy worlds of C.S. Lewis soon followed. As a teenager, I discovered the great novels, and was carried away into the villages and slums of Thomas Hardy and Dickens, curled up in my single bed at home. At 35, newly divorced, I was overwhelmed reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, because I too felt alone and adrift, like the boy on the boat with the tiger. Books can exalt time and place, remind you where you were in life the week you read them.  Just last month, I couldn’t wait to climb into bed with the new Nigella cookbook and fantasise about the gluttonous pleasures of chestnut icecream, at the expense of the husband who gave her to me.

Stories of the death of the book are everywhere . But not once had I heard an argument that captures what it is about books I love most, until an elderly American author called Philip Zimbardo said simply: ‘It is something you hold, near to your heart.” Yes! My books too, are pressed into me.

I am drawn to bookshops – there is something soothing about browsing amongst the shelves, thumbing new books, fingering embossed covers and sharp cut edges. It’s the promise of quiet escape.

Try getting sensuous with a Kindle, or an iPad – please tell me it’s not the same? Friends, avid readers also, have emptied their houses of books, fed up with the clutter and dust. They tell me I won’t miss the clumsy mass of my books, that electronic readers are brilliant by design and just as satisfying. I don’t believe them.

Do I fear the extinction of the book? Not yet. But I fear for bookshops. I take heart knowing the internet hasn’t killed off television, that television didn’t wipe out radio, radio didn’t hurt newspapers.  Technology is changing how we read, how we buy books and store them, but I will never part with my leafy treasures.

I will, however, buy hard-to-find books on the internet, and order others on-line when they’re half the price. But some books need to be fancied and flirted with in person. A cook book, in particular, must be felt, studied, assessed for compatibility with the cook. If it still inspires after that first meeting in the shop, it can be bought and taken home in a stiff paper bag to be consumed with the same greedy thrill as a new lover.

I cannot imagine the day when I do not look upon a much desired book and want to hold it as a rare and marvellous thing. I will then carry it gently to the bath, where no Kindle dares to follow.