Books

A poem by Dr. Jerry Sterns
Pharyngula, Oct 2007

Books will be replaced by electronic libraries, talking videos, interactive computers, CD-Roms with 100s of volumes, gigabytes of memory dancing on pixillated screens at which we will bleerily stare into eternity, and so I Sing the Song of the Book:

Nothing more voluptuous do I know than sitting with bright
pictures upon my lap and turning glossy pages of giraffes and
Gauguins penguins and pyramids
I love wide atlases, deliniating the rise and fall of empires, the
trade routes from Kashkar to Samarkand
I love heavy dictionaries, their tiny pictures, complicated columns,
minute definitions of incarnitive, and laniary, hagboat and
fopdoodle
I love the texture of pages, the high gloss slickness of magazines
as slippery as oiled eels
the soft nubble of old books, delicate India paper so thin that my
hands tremble trying to turn the fluttering dry leaves and the
yellow coarse cheap paper of mystery novels so gripping that I
don't care if the plane circles Atlanta forever, because it is a full
moon and I am stalking in the Arizona desert a malevolent shaped
shifter
I love the feel of ink on paper, the shiny varnishes, the silky
lacquers, the satiny mattes
I love the press of letters in thick paper, the roughness sizzles my
fingers with centuries of craft embedded in pulped old rags
My hands caress the leather of old bindings crumbling like
ancient gentlemen
I sing these pleasures of white paper and black ink of the small
jab of the hard cover corner at the edge of my diaphram, of the
look of type, of the flip of a page, of the sinful abandon of the
turned down corner, the reckless possessiveness of my marginal
scrawl
The cover picture as much a part of the book as the contents
itself--like Holden Caufield in his red cap turned backwards
staring away from us at what we all thought we should become
I also love those great fat bibles evangelists wave like otter pelts,
the long greying sets of unreadable authors, the tall books of
boyhood enthusiastically crayoned, the embossed covers of
adolescents, the tiny poetry anthologies you could slip in your
pocket
And the yellowing cookbooks of recipes for glace blanche dupont
and Argentine mocha toast, their stains and spots souvenirs of
long evenings full of love and arguments and the talk like as not of
books, books, books...