Johnny Depp, Sean Connery and the labyrinth of books

I confess to a long, profound love for rare books. I own many books about books: printing histories, catalogues of illuminated manuscripts, books about Elbert Hubbert and the Roycrofters, books about William Morris and the Kelmscott Press. It is a material infatuation. Here are five things I love about rare books:

1) Illuminations

2) Engravings

3) Bindings

4) Typography

5) Curiously compelling content

Given my fangirling about books like this, is it any wonder that two of my favorite movies are The Ninth Gate and The Name of the Rose?

The first is a paranormal thriller, very loosely based on Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel, El Club Dumas.

In it, Johnny Depp is a disreputable antiquarian book dealer tasked to verify a rare demonology text. Death and all manner of wickedness ensue, as might be expected from a plot that has Lucifer as the co-writer of the antique text in question.

It is a mediocre and deeply silly film but, oh, the production.

It is filled with gorgeously bound books; a twisty New York basement bookstore I'd love to haunt; a beautifully poignant personal library on a bare floor in a once-grand residence that nevertheless is creepier than hell. And, of course, there's Johnny Depp in his prime, trying to solve an intellectual puzzle that ultimately defies reason.

The second movie is based on Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose — a mishmash of murder mystery, semiotic play and history lesson that manages to work as a narrative. The movie — like the Ninth Gate, mediocre —plays fast and free with Eco's novel in ways that are truly annoying, but at its heart is still the man of both reason and faith (Sean Connery, in his prime, I'd argue) finding his way into a labyrinthine library that represents both an utter love of and utter fear of books.

That library. After picturing it in my mind's eye, I haunted antique stores for dusty armillary spheres, century-old engravings and, of course, the oldest books I could find (late 1700s was the best I could do).

What writer/reader wouldn't want to recreate some meander in that labyrinth?

In the Name of the Rose, Eco echoed (heh!) Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel, whose randomly-organized library was the infinite universe and the search to make sense of its tomes (in the form of a grail-like index of books) leads to repression and destruction, intellectual and spiritual despair, and the unmet but ever beckoning promise of reason.

"The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth," according to Borges' story "Ibn-Hakim Al-Bohkari, Murdered in his Labyrinth." And the minotaur resident in both the Ninth Gate and the Name of the Rose sports one horn that bows to the power of books, and another that gores the acquisition, disposition and uses of such power.

So, perhaps these two thoroughly mediocre movies are more astute than I thought. Because, isn't every reader, every collector of books caught by that minotaur's horns?

Every writer, too.

"It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is," Borges writes. "A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing."

Who knew loving books could be so dangerous.

• • •

Want more antique book porn? The Smithsonian's Book of Books is for you. Click here for the Amazon listing. Or, do what I do, follow @Libroantiguo on Twitter. Some of the images in this blog post are from their timeline or their web site.

Reading at the Fall Arts Festival (FAF) in Woodbury in September

I will be reading at the Fall Arts Festival in Woodbury, N.J. on Saturday, Sept. 28th, at 3 p.m. and again at 4:30 p.m. at The Lab on Broad Street. Reading the same day: Jenny Milchman, E.C. Myers, Sally Lilychild Willowbee, C.S.E. Cooney and Jennifer Walkup. More writers will be taking the stage on Sunday, for more information about both day's readers, click here.

For those who haven't heard of it the Fall Arts Festival is a weekend festival of more than 300 artists, artisans & craftspeople featuring five stages of free music, acoustic music lounge, performing arts, fine arts gallery, gourmet foods, interactive fun for kids and adults, wine & cheese tasting, craft beer tasting, art battles, chili cook-off, cake wars & other creative activities. 

Nuestras Voces, Our Voices: Emerging Latina writers talk about their work - Lorraine C. Ladish

Editor's note: this is the second in monthly series of guest blog posts in which emerging Latina writers talk about their work, their process and what inspires them.

  
Lorraine C. Ladish is the editor in chief of VivaFifty.com, an online publication for Latina moms. She is the mother of two young daughters and lives in Sarasota, Fla. with her blended family. Fully bilingual and bicultural, she has written 15 books of non-fiction (in Spanish) and two novels (in Spanish and English). Click here to go to her Amazon listings. Follow her on Twitter @lorrainecladish.

It started with books

I still remember the smell of ink of my grandfather’s printing press. The press spat out leaf after leaf of paper with printed words. The mechanical noise was comforting. It had a pattern to it. My sister and I would help collate the pages after they had been guillotined. Covers were glued on. They then became books. That happened on Saturdays. I must have been around six or seven years old.

My grandfather wrote. He wrote all the time. Longhand. On pieces of paper he would sometimes lose. He wrote wherever he was. He wrote poetry and read it to me. My father wrote too. He wrote on notebooks, using precise penmanship. He wrote with a fountain pen. At ten years old, so did I.

One of my schoolteachers once asked me for an autographed copy of one of my dad’s books. I gave her the book. She asked me whether it was autographed. I said yes. I didn’t know what autographed meant. She looked at the pages and told me the book wasn’t autographed. I took it back home to my father. He signed the book. I promised myself that from then on I would always ask what a word meant. I also realized it was important to autograph a book. One’s own book.

At 12, books were my best friends. I was shy. Very. I preferred books to people. Saturday mornings, it was the printing press, but the evenings were spent at the bookstore. We had more books than toys.

I thought everyone spent their free time reading and writing. My family did. Eventually I realized other people had other interests. But I continued reading and writing.

At 29, after years of writing just for myself in journals, I felt I had to do something important before I turned 30. I wrote a book. I managed to get it published. Don’t ask me how. But it happened.

Readers wrote to me. I felt like I´d done something of value. It felt good, so I wrote more books. All I wanted was to be a writer, a published writer. Yes, I could write in my journal, I could write for me … but I also wanted to do it for others.

My first book was non-fiction. My second book was too. My publisher didn’t want me to switch to fiction. It wouldn’t sell as well. I wrote more non-fiction. And I liked it.

I wrote novels too. Some were rejected. Thankfully. Eventually, two were published. Others were not. Thankfully too.

I continued writing … in my journal, in books, magazines. I even taught writing. Well, not really. I taught losing the fear of writing. Well, again, not really. I challenged people to lose the fear of writing. Some have gone on to publish books. They write e-mails letting me know of their accomplishments. I feel happy for them … and for me.

I had kids, and they have more books than toys. They see me write. They write too. I ended up publishing seventeen books. It sounds like a lot, but it feels like nothing. I need to write more. Like I need to drink water.

I became an editor … and yet I couldn’t stop writing. I couldn’t stop communicating. I wrote more books, I wrote blog posts, I wrote e mails.
I write. But I also run, draw, dance, speak, love and live. Because yes, I’m a writer, but most of all I’m a communicator.

And I’m OK with that.