Read all over

The customers came in and hung around, running their eyes along the titles on our spines, touching our covers with their hands, occasionally picking out a random volume and flicking through a couple of pages before putting it back.

The man who removed me from the shelf was not the first person to have flipped open my covers. But he seemed to linger longer over the contents. I could feel that the little hooks my author had put into the text, the little thorns of love, were catching on this reader. I was not mistaken. He eventually snapped me shut and headed for the cash desk to pay for me.

Once the transaction was validated, I was slipped into a paper bag and whisked out of the shop. In no time I was lying comfortably on my back on a shag pile rug in front of a gently glowing electric heater, between a mug of steaming coffee and a pristine ashtray. The curtains were closed. There were no sounds in the room to disturb my new owner’s communion with my contents and through me, with my author. I was the go-between who allowed two minds to meet. In fact, I thought, rather proudly, nowhere did one mind engage with another mind so completely and for such a substantial lapse of time than through one of my kind.

Gently my reader put his hands under my cover and tilted me to the angle most convenient to him. I could feel his excitement through his fingertips. How gently he stroked my pages, as he slowly turned them one by one, swallowing the code that had been carefully laid down on both sides, taking it in line by line, chapter and verse. The emotion I felt during this experience resembled strangely the emotion I felt as I was being written but it was, if anything, even stronger, for here my final, definitive, corrected version was being discovered by someone for the first time. The only work the reader had to do was read, and enjoy the words, whereas, prior to publication, everyone who read me had been asked to cast a critical eye and remove anything that could diminish that reader’s enjoyment.

Oh yes, this reader was the privileged one. As he progressed through my chapters, sometimes light and swift, sometimes slower, taking the trouble to read a sentence or a whole paragraph through twice, I wondered at this mysterious relationship between my author and this person. The two had never met, would probably never meet, and yet the relationship was startlingly profound. Ever more eagerly my pages were turned in succession. From time to time, the reader would place a finger on the line just read, and gaze dreamily into space. Eventually, the pace began to slow. As the number of pages still to be read dwindled, and the end neared, the reader seemed to slow down, as if he wanted to make the experience last as long as possible, without actually stopping the process.

The inevitable happened. A flick of a page and the end of the text was in sight. The reader continued to the last word, then turned the page over as if to make sure there was not something more on the other side. There was not. I had been read all over, cover to cover, every word, the whole story, and just as I had shared in the initial excitement of discovery, now I was forced to sympathise with a sense of loss. I felt as if I had been a real companion to him throughout the reading, and now his new found friend had simply got up and left. Would he start again at the beginning? Or pick another volume from some other shelves? For a long time he did neither. He simply stared into space.