The lovely hardback

17.01.12 | Martin Latham

One of the world’s most beautiful books is the Bodleian Library’s Shakespeare. It is the only edition left in its original, simple 1623 binding. “Patina" is too effete a word to describe how handled, battered and well-worn it looks. It’s like that old pair of boots that Van Gogh painted.

In his Man Booker acceptance speech Julian Barnes rightly said that the physical book must be beautiful to be worth buying in a digital age; and many modern hardbacks will not improve with antiquity. Shoddy book production will not help bookshops to survive. E-book readers are like those agnostics who want their religion, when they dip into it, to be full on: incense, weeping statues and stigmata. But they pop into midnight mass and what do they get? Guitar-strumming nuns and priests in chinos.

Similarly, your e-book reader, entering a bookshop, wants an Aladdin’s cave stocked with lasting artefacts. It is time to restart the innovative development of the book which stalled around 1850, when quickly yellowing wood-based paper replaced cloth-based, less acidic, papers (“acid-free paper" merely means “with added alkali"). Using trees for books is an unfortunate blip in book history, which technology, I hope, can soon solve.

Then there is the cover. Hardback covers are frequently too thin, so they buckle quickly. So many books’ pages blacken at the base as the “text block" sags, let down by cheap covers and imperfect spine construction. Endpapers and endbands (those stripy strips atop the pages) should be strengtheners, not cod adornments. Publishers must stop skiving: this word means the scraping of leather down to a micro-thickness. Today, “leather bindings" are usually a meld of PVA glue with a homeopathic amount of hide, as their smell connotes.

Several sexy book styles have fallen into disuse. In our shop this Christmas, a travel bestseller was a new £30 history of maps which contained, in pockets, several removable folded maps (The Men Who Mapped the World by Beau Riffenburgh). I have not seen such a thing since Thesiger made Mark Longman put them in Arabian Sands (1959). The Atlas of Remote Islands was surely the most beautiful hardback of 2011 (and a runaway seller, too). Its jacketless, tactile cloth cover points to a beautiful future in which we can all abandon the tacky laminated-paper jacket. Bookmarks of real silk, not Ann Summers satin, help to preserve spinal strength.  

We need not a Luddite regression, but a renaissance for hardbacks; technology and invention conspiring to create something you can both throw at your partner and bequeath to your children. The excellent new Penguin cloth classics are a good start. All readers have a totemic book that they want in an atmospheric edition. Publishers might cite cost limits, but they have priced Jason Manford’s apologia at £19, and allegedly bought Lee Evans’ for a million. Surely there is space in there for more real hardbacks?

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