In the Good Books - Esther

Reading is great. I was always a reader. I don’t remember what it was like not to be able to read. I’m lucky. Not everyone finds it as easy to read & not everyone enjoys it. That seems like a great pity. As a reader, you learn, you empathise, you grow. Added to that, you’re never bored. There really is something for everyone. So many genres, subjects & formats exist for you to get into, now more than ever. There is more representation, although that’s still necessarily evolving as awareness & possibilities expand. Whilst traditional print format magazines & newspapers might be dying out (not helped by lockdown: RIP my beloved Q magazine), technology dictates that there are more devices & platforms for reading than before. 

For my most recent birthday & in part due to the inability to trail endlessly round bookshops (thanks again, Covid), I did what I said I never would & bought myself a Kindle. There are advantages & disadvantages of course, not least a virtual book pile as well as a real one to get through, but getting something to read instantly is the thing I find most appealing. I can read it anywhere, even with a lack of light (always a consideration here) & although it doesn’t look as cool as rows & rows of books on shelves, I’m pleased with it. 

The Old Bookcase, Friedrich Frotzel (1929)

Other people’s reading habits are vaguely interesting (as I suggested last week…) & be honest – when someone was presenting on TV during lockdown, who hasn’t been trying to read the book titles behind them? & judging them? & who amongst them hasn’t hand-picked the books for the purpose or at the very least selected which bookshelf to stand in front of as they speak? What we read is an additional aspect of ourselves, what makes us who we are. Sadly whether or not we choose to read at all is yet another. 

Throughout art history, the status symbol of owning a library or being educated enough to be literate at all has featured. It was a sign of some times in the past that it was only the wealthy that had access to the printed word & unfortunately today there remains a poverty divide in literacy skills. 

In any case, readers & books have been depicted in a range of artworks & whilst observing someone read may be akin to watching paint dry, there are nevertheless reasons behind these works. Even if it is only, “Look at me! I can read!”

As always, human experience belongs in art. It reflects our lives & values but it also reflects the everyday, the ordinary & the workplace. One of the earliest examples of communicating in “print” is alleged to have been the Ten Commandments rendered on tablets of stone. “Tablets” of course has a multitude of meanings today, but here Rembrandt leaves us in no doubt which “tablet” Moses With the Ten Commandments is waving in the air for all to see. & obey. Or else.

Guercino’s Portrait of Francesco Righetti (1626-8) & an unknown artist’s portrait of William Cartwright (1797) not only give us an insight into the lives, appearance & demeanour of the sitters & their occupations (doctor of laws & dramatist respectively), but into how books were previously stored. The spines are not showing & the titles appear on the bottom of the pages or tail-edge.

For a long time the book that was available in Europe was of course the Bible & St Jerome is credited with translating it into Greek & Hebrew. In Marinus van Reymerswale’s (16th century) painting St Jermone in His Study, we see differently made books. A complete & undoubtedly pricey bound book sits on his desk, showing his scholarly lifestyle & vast learning. Not only that but he has stitched books lying in front of him which would have been supple & easy to keep open. Also cheap to make & buy.

Tavolette, e Libri per li putti (1646) by Annibale Carracci depicts a bookseller peddling from his basket & clearly showing how the book was constructed. At an earlier time, street book vendors would have similarly sold prayer books once the printing press made them more affordable.

Madame de Pompadour (1756) by Francois Boucher shows an obviously wealthy woman with an unbound book in her hand, casually looking away from it & handling it very lightly, even carelessly. Evidently there was a trend for unbound books in France at the time since it was an inexpensive method of making them. Madame is telling us she is so well-off & well-educated that she can do this kind of thing for fun! Yes fun! Not everyone in the eighteenth century was as entitled to fun. 

There’s always one trying to ruin it for everybody else. Belgium’s Antoine Wiertz was a strange, confident man & an absolutely hilarious (if unwittingly) artist. Going by his paintings, he enjoyed judging others & telling them how they should be living their lives. In 1853’s Le liseuse de romans (The Reader of Novels), he warns us of the dangers of reading fiction, as a demonic figure pushes the drug of literature towards a woman. & I’m quite sure that mirror represents her foolish vanity & the sin of pride that entails. Unfortunately for Antoine however, the overall effect only serves to make reading look like enormous entertainment, since the woman is not only naked but comfortable, possibly ecstatic & has loads to read.

One way or another, art will always amble round to Surrealism. In his paintings, Jonathan Wolstenholme neatly anthropomorphises books as if they’re every part of our lives, as if they are in us or they become part of us to the extent we are also them. Playful & remarkably beautiful his Cross Reference (2003?) has transformed to books become so cross- & self-referencing they are reading each other.

However you take your reading, I hope you enjoy it. Art will suggest places, lighting, subjects & storage for you. Whether you’re learning, having fun, letting it take you elsewhere I hope you achieve the bourgeois indolence epitomised in Abigail Larson’s sumptuous Asleep in the Library (2018) scene from her Beauty & the Beast project. If this doesn’t tempt you, I fear nothing will.