paper through which, it seems, you could not possibly have traveled.
What unites all books, as Abelardo Morell is able to document in these magnificent photographs, and what is responsible for a good measure of their appeal, is their inter-dimensional ambiguity. Does the printed page inhabit two dimensions, or three, or four? As we read or look, we pretend that a page is an ideally flat and code-bearing plane, with a measurable height and width but no thickness and no curvature. But a page is almost never flat except when a book is closed; opened, its surface rises up slightly toward the inside margin and then veers south into the binding, like a mounding wave.
And of course each page has thickness. Your fingertips know this perfectly well: they inform you immediately when they have by mistake snagged two corners together, rather than one, in preparation for turning. The embossed letters in a book for the blind cast sharp shadows. Some paper is marvelously thin: the thickest books, the big dictionaries, for instance, whose bindings arch upward into mining tunnels when opened, sometimes have the flimsiest, rattliest pages. And into these towering cliffs of reference the publisher scoops out a series of alphabetic fingerholds as an aid to the word-hunter; crescent-moon notches that then become worn, so Morell’s camera records, as if made of soft sandstone, by the impatient touch of many queries.
Bad things happen to books all the time, and then the books hold the record in their pages of those disasters, too. Books become water-soaked and writhe into the shapes of giant clams, and they wait in warehouses for dealers to cut pages out of them for piecemeal sale. Over many decades, paper changes color and becomes more fragile (though considerably less fragile than some paper-apocalyptists have claimed)—the particular fragility of an old volume is part of what it has to tell us.
Some of the most evocative photographs in this collection are the ones in which a book is allowed to fall open slightly, so that we glimpse some of the foreshortened secrets (an upward-glancing face, a colosseum) it may hold. Pages, for the most part, live out their long lives in the dark, keeping hidden what inky burdens they bear, pressed tightly against their neighbors, communicating nothing, until suddenly, like the lightbulb in the refrigerator that seems to be always on but almost never is, one of them is called upon to speak—and it does.
(2002)
No Step
I n 1994, I took a nap on an airplane. On waking, I pushed up the oval window shade and looked outside. The window was surprisingly hot to the touch: incoming sunlight had bounced off the closed shade, heating it up. And the wing looked hot, too, like something you would use to press a shirt. But it wasn’t hot; volumes of freezing wind were flowing over and under it—invisibly wispy, top-of-Mount-Everest wind. Suddenly I felt an injustice in being so close to the wing, closer than any other passenger, and yet being unable to determine for myself, by touch, what temperature it was. Would my finger stick to it?
The plane turned, so that the long sickle-shape of sun-dazzle slid from the wing and fell to earth; and then, in the shadow of the fuselage, dozens of Phillips-head screws appeared, like stars coming out in an evening sky. Some of these wing screws surrounded a stenciled message, which I read. The message was: WARNING WET FUEL CELL DO NOT REMOVE .
A few months later, on a Boeing 757, I was given a window seat with an excellent view of the right engine. The engine was painted a dark glossy blue; it hung below thewing, shiny and huge, bobbling a little in the turbulence, like a large breast or a horse’s testicle. There was a message on the engine. HOIST POINT , it said.
In April 1996 I looked out directly over another wing. Its leading edge was made of shiny naked metal, but the middle of the wing had been painted a pinky beige color. The painted part looked like a path—and
What unites all books, as Abelardo Morell is able to document in these magnificent photographs, and what is responsible for a good measure of their appeal, is their inter-dimensional ambiguity. Does the printed page inhabit two dimensions, or three, or four? As we read or look, we pretend that a page is an ideally flat and code-bearing plane, with a measurable height and width but no thickness and no curvature. But a page is almost never flat except when a book is closed; opened, its surface rises up slightly toward the inside margin and then veers south into the binding, like a mounding wave.
And of course each page has thickness. Your fingertips know this perfectly well: they inform you immediately when they have by mistake snagged two corners together, rather than one, in preparation for turning. The embossed letters in a book for the blind cast sharp shadows. Some paper is marvelously thin: the thickest books, the big dictionaries, for instance, whose bindings arch upward into mining tunnels when opened, sometimes have the flimsiest, rattliest pages. And into these towering cliffs of reference the publisher scoops out a series of alphabetic fingerholds as an aid to the word-hunter; crescent-moon notches that then become worn, so Morell’s camera records, as if made of soft sandstone, by the impatient touch of many queries.
Bad things happen to books all the time, and then the books hold the record in their pages of those disasters, too. Books become water-soaked and writhe into the shapes of giant clams, and they wait in warehouses for dealers to cut pages out of them for piecemeal sale. Over many decades, paper changes color and becomes more fragile (though considerably less fragile than some paper-apocalyptists have claimed)—the particular fragility of an old volume is part of what it has to tell us.
Some of the most evocative photographs in this collection are the ones in which a book is allowed to fall open slightly, so that we glimpse some of the foreshortened secrets (an upward-glancing face, a colosseum) it may hold. Pages, for the most part, live out their long lives in the dark, keeping hidden what inky burdens they bear, pressed tightly against their neighbors, communicating nothing, until suddenly, like the lightbulb in the refrigerator that seems to be always on but almost never is, one of them is called upon to speak—and it does.
(2002)
No Step
I n 1994, I took a nap on an airplane. On waking, I pushed up the oval window shade and looked outside. The window was surprisingly hot to the touch: incoming sunlight had bounced off the closed shade, heating it up. And the wing looked hot, too, like something you would use to press a shirt. But it wasn’t hot; volumes of freezing wind were flowing over and under it—invisibly wispy, top-of-Mount-Everest wind. Suddenly I felt an injustice in being so close to the wing, closer than any other passenger, and yet being unable to determine for myself, by touch, what temperature it was. Would my finger stick to it?
The plane turned, so that the long sickle-shape of sun-dazzle slid from the wing and fell to earth; and then, in the shadow of the fuselage, dozens of Phillips-head screws appeared, like stars coming out in an evening sky. Some of these wing screws surrounded a stenciled message, which I read. The message was: WARNING WET FUEL CELL DO NOT REMOVE .
A few months later, on a Boeing 757, I was given a window seat with an excellent view of the right engine. The engine was painted a dark glossy blue; it hung below thewing, shiny and huge, bobbling a little in the turbulence, like a large breast or a horse’s testicle. There was a message on the engine. HOIST POINT , it said.
In April 1996 I looked out directly over another wing. Its leading edge was made of shiny naked metal, but the middle of the wing had been painted a pinky beige color. The painted part looked like a path—and
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