Text/Texture

I love books. I am excited by new discoveries, ideas, knowledge. I like learning.

I love the feel of books, too: their weight, the flexing and yielding of paperbacks and the stately solidity of a hardcover. The heft of a stack of books feels like treasure. I was cleaning up broken glass very early one morning and was struck with wonder at how it is that we can feel with our fingertips a single shard of glass—really just a grain of sand—so small that we can scarcely see it. And our sensitive fingertips and alert brains, as Kurt Vonnegut remarked, tell us that books are good for us. I love the feel of the pages of a book: not the glossy, plasticky kind, but the slightly rough, porous kind. The kind that inspires awe when you look closely and consider the typographical outposts imposed on that fibrous terrain.

And you can see on the page and in your mind the weaving of a good story, description or explanation. And in seeing it so clearly, you can almost feel the warp and woof of good writing like the texture of a warm blanket.