National Bookshop Day

Yesterday was National Bookshop Day, supported by the Australian Booksellers Association it's the kind of weekend celebration you would miss unless you follow/friend/favorite your local bookstore, or the media stations which cover these kind of literary events.  Even so, I nearly missed it.  It loops in, in my mind, with the National Year of Reading 2012 (#NYR12) which is a 'collaborative project joining public libraries, government, community groups, media and commercial partners, and of course the public.'  Yes, let's not forget the (reading) public.  Watching the news last night I listened to a bookseller enthuse about hard copy books, how they would never be supplanted by electronic versions because people like touching them.  The tactileness of the reader experience so often referenced by book lovers, and, the smell of books.


It was the smell of books which always put me off libraries, all those hands and food stained fingers wandering over pages.  My first job in a library on the loans desk at The University of Auckland Library rid me of my squeamishness.   In  my interview for that job I told my prospective employer that I loved books which was why I wanted to work there.  He smiled patiently  and told me that there wouldn't be time to read books.  And that was true (well, most of the time).  But the books that passed through my hands as I wanded barcodes, books borrowed by students from every faculty and stage of their degrees, was a thrill to me.  A title I had never heard before, authors I thought I knew well but didn't, a subject unknown breaking into the light.  With a touch of my wand I was learning, soaking up books, knowledge, the secrets displayed on a monitor in front of me, and, due back in four weeks.


Hard copy books and booksellers will become more and more of a rarefied species, but that doesn't make me forlorn.  As long as librarians are recording the titles, cataloguing their presence, digital and physical, catching the metadata and pointing people to the shelf, to the URL, mapping a path and leaving a readable trail.  A book is no less a book because it's pages can only be turned on an iPad, mobile or Kindle, there is still something reverential in that page turning, even if it is mediated by a screen.