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The Magic of Making A Little Book
I’ve Got Your Saturday Afternoon Plans Covered
Although I understand that I am about to commit a great transgression of cliché, I’d like to begin with a pair of definitions. What is a book? And what makes something little?
I don’t have a dictionary handy (or the internet, which I’m sure you’ll find hard to believe, but I’m writing on a treadmill), so these definitions are drawing only upon my 35 years of experience and nothing more.
A book is a collection of pages that have been bound. I am going to lean into this simple definition because it allows for a book to take on so many forms, as it should. A book says, “One page is not enough pages. We need more than one.” It also says, “I want you to have the convenience of being able to throw these pages all over the place without needing to reorganize them. And therefore I, the book, am an object that implies care.” You may be wondering about ebooks, since they are not, technically speaking, bound. Ebooks have their own word because they are their own thing, and for our purposes, a book is something you can hold. If holding something doesn’t seem immediately important to you, please stop reading this essay, take off your shoes, and put your toes in some grass. It’s probably been too long since you’ve done that.
