The look of books
Aesthetics
Cover, size, look of print,size of print, font type
Light, medium or dark print
Colour and page environment
White page, off white, slightly yellowed, very yellowed
Dirty, mouldy, unidentified stains
Food, liquid, grease, sweat, other.
The cover of books?
I’ll let someone else cover the cover.
Books are meant to be shared
An old, well used paperback or hardback
is good as long as it’s clean
The odd elusive grease stain is acceptable
Can be ignored easily
But then, when we get into food stains
of the third kind
of the oily, damp, highly coloured
sticky kind
the ones that graduate to 3D status
by that, I mean actual food stuffs
Then, my will to ignore
becomes weak.
When I was growing up
the Childrens Library was the absolute worst
for undesirable and unidentifable stains in books.
The stains were mostly food and liquids
the ones I couldn’t stomach
were the green ones
They seemed to appear regularly on the pages
Maybe it was just once
and it traumatized me enough to think
it was just snot all the way
a terrible distraction from whatever I was reading
I had a slight germ phobia
so the children’s book, story and author
had less of an impact than those
slightly alien 3D luminous green things.
The bottom line is, I thought things would get better when I graduated to The Adult Library.
Then I discovered that books for adults were a whole other ball game. Quite literally.
Things In My Head 