A Book By Any Other Cover

Once I've started reading a certain copy of a book, I can't switch to a different copy in the middle of the process. It doesn't matter if the two editions share the same exact content and same exact page numbers, once I've switched, the reading experience is ruined for me. If I manage to finish the book at all (sorry, One Hundred Years of Solitude, you didn't make it through the transition!), I do so crankily, feeling out-of-sorts and cheated for having to hold some stranger of a book in my hands.

I can even feel copy mourning long after I've finished reading a book. When I thought I had lost my first copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (the copy I had read at least three times) . . .

 . . . I went out and bought a new copy, but I didn't even like to touch the thing, with its matte cover and Photoshopped Prague:

I sold it to a used book store just as soon as I got my old copy back.

And then there's Middlemarch: I was only halfway through it when I had to return my copy to the public library. I considered buying a copy of my own that I would never have to return to anyone, but I couldn't find the same Modern Library edition. I almost panicked.

It's not that I'm so very much in love with Modern Library editions. It's true that this copy had a nice hard cover, a decent dust jacket, and Biblically thin pages (which I love). But more importantly, I worried that I'd run out of steam on the fat novel once I was holding some cheap paperback in my hands (I almost lost The Brother's Karamazov that way).

The body of a book means something to the human brain, or at least it means something to my brain. If a book does not provide some sort of sensually pleasing experience (soft, floppy pages; a pleasantly inky smell; alluring cover art; etc.), I have a poorer relationship with it. No matter how intellectual of a process reading seems to be, the way a book is constructed will always color how it is read. It's kind of like poetry: no matter how good the ideas inside a poem are, it's hard to love them without a startlingly beautiful image to plug those ideas into reality.

I know that I would never have finished Middlemarch if I had switched over to the Penguin Popular Classics edition:

I'm pretty sure that its pages would have been rough and pulpy, but the cover is obviously the worst part: the Penguin copy looks old and dull and, let's admit it, drenched in the sort of thing that collects in the main characters' chamber pots. No one wants to read a book with that lurking in their subconscious.

This is why I've spent so much money on slightly nicer copies of books that I could find cheaper elsewhere, and this is why I've hesitated to buy a Kindle or a Nook or a Sony Reader: if all e-books have essentially the same feel to them, some part of me wonders whether the content will all start to feel the same, too.

This is also why I drove to the public library one town over just to check out the exact same Modern Library edition of Middlemarch. And it was totally worth it: my brain was never distracted by pulpy pages or a flimsy cover. It was just me and my idea of Middlemarch, getting down to business.