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They promised snow...
Feb. 29th, 2012 09:26 pm...but all we got was this rain.
Sorry, I didn't mean for that to sound like a complaint.
* * * The battle between ebooks and books may be a fully twenty-first century struggle, but there was a time when cut and trimmed pages represented progress over books whose pages had to be cut apart by the reader.
I don't know how widespread the practice is (or was), but it seems to me that altogether too many of my mother's French literature books fell into this latter category. I ran across a copy of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, published by Librairie Garnier Frères, Paris, in just this way. And one curious side-effect of this method of publishing—done presumably to save the cost of trimming the pages—is that you can pretty much tell exactly how much of the book its owner actually read (leaving aside the possibility that pages left uncut are the result of having acquired a different edition of the book that doesn't require quite so much labor and a handy sharp edge).
Another book I handled today was a paperback edition of Giovanni Boccacio's Il Decamerone, published in 1932 in Milan, with nicely trimmed pages. On the one hand, holding such a classic in my hands, it stung a little that my Italian is confined to a handful of words commonly used in the U.S. and having mostly to do with food and Mario Puzo's books; on the other, the book was written in the middle of the 16th century (a dozen or so years before the birth of Shakespeare), so perhaps it is not an easy read for native Italians in this day and age (just as Shakespeare's work poses a challenge for today's English-speakers).
And a bunch of other stuff went into the trash.
Cheers...
Sorry, I didn't mean for that to sound like a complaint.
I don't know how widespread the practice is (or was), but it seems to me that altogether too many of my mother's French literature books fell into this latter category. I ran across a copy of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, published by Librairie Garnier Frères, Paris, in just this way. And one curious side-effect of this method of publishing—done presumably to save the cost of trimming the pages—is that you can pretty much tell exactly how much of the book its owner actually read (leaving aside the possibility that pages left uncut are the result of having acquired a different edition of the book that doesn't require quite so much labor and a handy sharp edge).
Another book I handled today was a paperback edition of Giovanni Boccacio's Il Decamerone, published in 1932 in Milan, with nicely trimmed pages. On the one hand, holding such a classic in my hands, it stung a little that my Italian is confined to a handful of words commonly used in the U.S. and having mostly to do with food and Mario Puzo's books; on the other, the book was written in the middle of the 16th century (a dozen or so years before the birth of Shakespeare), so perhaps it is not an easy read for native Italians in this day and age (just as Shakespeare's work poses a challenge for today's English-speakers).
And a bunch of other stuff went into the trash.
Cheers...
