Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
Raised in a house filled with old books, I'm drawn to them: the dust jackets that call out a historical moment, the marbled boards, the words pressed into the page with movable type.
The images from the book you make in your head are always going to be the best images.
My mother always kept library books in the house, and one rainy Sunday afternoon - this was before television, and we didn't even have a radio - I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered I was reading and enjoying what I read.
When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.
In the summer of 1866, as Leo Tolstoy prepared for his serialized novel 'War and Peace' to be published as a single volume, he wrote to illustrator Mikhail Bashilov, hoping to commission drawings for the new edition of the novel, which he referred to by its original title,1805.
It is a curious fact that with 'Through the Looking-Glass' the faculty of making book illustrations departed from me... I have done nothing in that direction since.
No one ever questions where all these pictures in magazines and books come from.
