Are you a bibliophile?

The term “bibliophile” means a lover (phile) of books (biblio). The word is often used to refer to people who simply like to read fiction, but “bibliophile” means something more specific: someone who loves books especially for quality or format, how books look, how they smell, what they feel like. Bibliophiles also value books as fascinating objects in themselves, objects with their own stories to tell. 

To find out if you belong to this type read this interview with renowned writer Julian Barnes (1946), author of A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters  (1997) and The Sense of an Ending (2011) among many other amazing novels.

Julian Barnes

A declared bibliophile, Barnes reflects on the importance of books in his life and explains why he prefers secondhand books to new ones:

By now, I probably preferred secondhand books to new ones. In America such items were disparagingly referred to as "previously owned"; but this very continuity of ownership was part of their charm. A book dispensed its explanation of the world to one person, then another, and so on down the generations; different hands held the same book and drew sometimes the same, sometimes a different wisdom from it. Old books showed their age: they had fox marks the way old people had liver spots. They also smelt good – even when they reeked of cigarettes and (occasionally) cigars. And many might disgorge pungent ephemera: ancient publishers' announcements and old bookmarks - often for insurance companies or Sunlight soap.

Barnes further explains why, despite the popularisation of e-books and e-readers, printed books and bookshops will not disappear:

I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader. Nor do I think the e-reader will ever completely supplant the physical book – even if it does so numerically. Every book feels and looks different in your hands; every Kindle download feels and looks exactly the same (though perhaps the e-reader will one day contain a "smell" function, which you will click to make your electronic Dickens novel suddenly reek of damp paper, fox marks and nicotine).

Books will have to earn their keep – and so will bookshops. Books will have to become more desirable: not luxury goods, but well-designed, attractive, making us want to pick them up, buy them, give them as presents, keep them, think about rereading them, and remember in later years that this was the edition in which we first encountered what lay inside. I have no luddite prejudice against new technology; it's just that books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information. My father's school prizes are nowadays on my shelves, 90 years after he first won them. I'd rather read Goldsmith's poems in this form than online.

Are you a bibliophile?