Prologue

In this section of the Rose Room I long for the physical form
of books. Books are tactile things – you should hold a book,
experience the particular crinkle of its pages, guide your
hand along its spine and inhale its scent. Musty-odor’d books
take me back to the long upstairs hallway in my grandmother’s
house where the stories my mother read as a child still
adorned the shelves.

In my early adulthood I was taught to make books – to stitch
together their pages and correctly measure their covers. I
was taught this in the basement of a university library -
libraries have a regal, almost mythical air to them. Handling an
individual book offers the sensation of connecting to something
precious, likely to last much longer than yourself. So here -
in a virtual room - the term ‘bookshelf’ is poorly used to describe
masses of typed out text slapped onto a screen. In real life these
stories exist as mini-books – carefully encased in cloth and paper
binding. Pages are designed to break at suspenseful moments,
and the ultimate ‘THE END’ is inked via black felt tip pen.

I wish you could visit these stories on a true bookshelf – but, here, this is the best I can do.

Posted by acr at December 31, 2004 07:00 AM | TrackBack