Crack that spine every which way

The feeling of painfully surfacing in the real world in a busy coffee house, or on the Tube, or in fact even in your own bed, after being immersed in a captivating book is the same feeling as being dragged from a deep sleep. You suddenly feel slightly unsure of where you are, the time of day, who you are, or when and how you managed to consume a full bag of Doritos.

This isn't about my love of reading, however. Although I'm sure at some point I'll be writing a love letter to this raunchy pastime of mine.

Instead, as my aversion to cold weather has massively impaired the amount of wandering around London I've been doing, it's about books themselves.

Before I go any further let me settle the book versus Kindle debate once and for all. I've had conversations with a few people about this, and most seem to fall down on one side or the other. I know of one person in particular who resents being given actual books if they can be bought on a Kindle. When debating with him, I found myself responding with an embarrassingly soppy homage to libraries in defence of books. I know others who refuse to go anywhere near a Kindle, for fear it'll be cheating on their analogue friends. I then find myself becoming an ambassador for Amazon, seemingly hell bent on earning as much commission from sales as possible.

I have a Kindle. I adore it. But this doesn't mean it's either/or. It can be both.

Now, I know a number of people who like to make sure the spines of their books remain unbroken. They carefully keep their books in pristine condition, making sure they never bend the covers too far and always use an appropriate bookmark to mark their place. They contort themselves into obscene positions to peer at the words rather than risk damaging the pages. My best friend once texted me purely to share the pain she was experiencing watching the woman sat opposite her on the Tube bending her book. 

But I love books that have been passed around, bent, torn, been dropped in baths and dried on a radiator, have questionable stains, illegible scribbles in the margins, and carefully worded personal messages inside the front cover. 

These dear 'book preserver' friends of mine look at me in horror as I gleefully twist my paperbacks into positions the Spanish Inquisitors could have learnt a thing or two from, and dog ear my pages. If I borrow one of their books, from the look of fear in their eyes as they reluctantly hand it over you'd think I was about to throw the pages onto a bonfire and commit the ultimate sacrilege in setting alight to them. My response to my best friend's text about the book-abuser on the Tube? I threatened to break into her flat in the dead of night and break all the spines of the books on her shelves. For her own good, of course. Not to satisfy a slight sadistic streak I appear to harbour.

I can't help it. It's similar to how I feel about notebooks. I have a slightly inappropriate emotional/nostalgic attachment to books. There's an enjoyment in abusing them or picking up a book that's seen a few years and a few owners and a few tea spillages. It seems cruel to not personalise the pages with your experience of reading the contents. It's that inextricable connection with where you were when you read the story, who you were with, or which holiday you were on, how the story made you feel. And when you re-read the book it's remembering how a particular mark was made, or coming across bits of sand, or an old receipt that you hurriedly used as a bookmark.

But it's not just abusing your own books, but coming across books that have been abused by others. I once found myself spending over an hour in an area of Camden Stables browsing the shelves of a second-hand book shop. I guiltily left with a bag full of books, including two that had been signed by the author, for the cost of buying one new hardback. I recently bought an 1980s edition of George Orwell's Down and Out in London and Paris from eBay that cost £2 and has a beautiful crease down the front cover. I've ruined books that I've given as gifts by writing a message inside to the new owner, making the book just that little bit more personal. Again, it's that knowledge that the object you're holding has a history, that someone else has held the pages and read the words, or could do in the future. The Kindle is fantastic for consuming just the story. The preserved book is a way of having the words there, in your hands. The abused paperback, however, is a way of truly immersing yourself in the journey of the book and the experience of the story.

So there you have it. The simple joy of holding and abusing books, whether they're yours or someone else's.

And as I've spend most of this railing on about books as opposed to reading, here's a lovely little video about Girls Who Read to readdress the balance.

Allow me a moment of indulgence...

I have a confession to make: the unadulterated joy I get from a fresh ink cartridge in a fountain pen.

In fact, not only a fresh ink cartridge in a fountain pen, but also using that fountain pen in a notebook with ridiculously flamboyant binding and thin-ruled lines (always thin-ruled. Never, ever wide-ruled).

Oh yes ladies and gents, after the previous thoughtful blogpost about not isolating yourself from the world around you by sticking your headphones in, this one is about the highly important and newsworthy topic of pens and notebooks. But then again, this is a blog about embracing the small pleasures in life, so bear with me.

I can try to describe exactly what this fascination with ink and paper is, but the words won't do it justice — either you get it or you don't. A bit like hereditary baldness.

And you know who you are if you're a member of this depraved club, and we have the ability to identify ourselves to each other with nought more than a loving sidewards glance towards and the stroke of a desired notebook. Do you guiltily have a drawer full of unused notebooks, that you convinced yourself you'd find a use for whilst handing over your money? Or perhaps they're hidden on your shelves in amongst your paperbacks. Or stacked in a corner of your room somewhere. Do you find yourself unconsciously gravitating towards the stationery section of a book shop, or The Pen Shop? Do you die a little inside if left with no other option than to use a pen that doesn't quite feel right? Or if the ink bleeds like a spider's web along the paper? If the first page of a virgin notebook doesn't look perfect once you've finally started writing, do you carefully rip it from the seams so you can start again? (I've ingeniously solved this eternal dilemma by leaving the problematic first page blank, and therefore unsullied). If the answer is a whispered, wide-eyed 'yes' to any of these questions, then I hate to break it to you but you're one of us. Embrace it. Admit it. Nurture it.

I'm not someone who rails against the lost art of handwriting, who refuses to go anywhere near a computer and laments the (exaggerated) reports of the death of the paperback. I've been known to lovingly paw my iPhone, I unashamedly adore my Kindle and I'm the first to admit my handwriting is ludicrously minuscule, becoming entirely illegible even to me if anything but the greatest care is taken whilst writing.

But there's something deeply, deeply satisfying about turning through the pages of a notebook or sketchbook that's been carefully inscribed with someone's handwriting using black ink (and again, always black. Never, ever blue. At a push then maybe sepia, but only if the colour of the paper is a complementary cream). It's as though the content is an irrelevant by-product of the form; it could be a catalogue of someone's sock collection or an original manuscript of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for all I care.

Maybe it's the inescapable link with the person whose handwriting fills the pages. If you're someone who loves notebooks and pens, then you'll know that feeling of looking back over what you've written and feeling undoubtedly and inescapably that it's you on those pages. When reading something that someone else has handwritten it's just so very personal — the unique tics in their scrawl, the particular way they loop their g's, whether it's neatly and painstakingly drawn out or scribbled as though they couldn't get it down quick enough. It's that same feeling you get when you come across a 15th century text in a museum; the feeling that the person who made the marks on the paper is there in the room with you, looking over your shoulder. It's something that you inevitably lose through typed words printed out onto A4 sheets of white paper or seen on a screen.

And this isn't a phenomenon reserved solely for women, nor a particular generation. I've had long conversations with various gentlemen about fountain pens, comparing nib sizes (bigger isn't always necessarily better folks) and I know of a young man, who shall rename nameless, who has recently bought at least two notebooks after squealing joyously at the look and colour of their bindings (you, yes you. You know who you are). With no hesitation I can think of at least seven people that I've had in-depth conversations with about the joys of notebooks and pens.

And so I make no apologies for this purely self-indulgent musing, and I leave you with two things. The first is a brilliant quote from the novel One Day by David Nicholls:

"She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of bus tickets, on the wall of the cell. Emma is lost on anything other less than 120gsm."

And the second is a photo of a page from one of my notebooks. *satisfied sigh*