Kipling, Rudyard / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
It’s chasmic, the fall of words down lines curved by the half open page to the black gulch below, where shadows form on sunny days or in the half light, oblique; at fifty degrees and cool as the cover is under the fingers on the other side of the world: fifty degrees and cool, the right angle for light and weather.
I knew a boy in junior school who’d rub the ear of the upcoming page restlessly — tschk, tschk, tschk, tschk, tschk — until he could turn it and continue.
Fat softcover fantasy too heavy to hold for long without a prop is curled up to, a little finger absently at work along the gnarled, obdurate spine.
The yellowing of the paper, the loss of the printer’s musk, replaced by mites and dust. A thing that weathers. A geography. A chasm. A world. That is the book.
