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Does the Book Still Matter?
Review Date: NOVEMBER 01, 2009
Category: NONE
Classification: ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
For anyone who works in or around publishing—and that includes us reviewers—hardly a day goes by without our considering the Death of Print. Not of the book, but of the codex, that pages-bound-by-sewing-or-gluing technology that has—since it started replacing scrolls sometime around the turn of the millennium before the millennium before last—been our preferred way of storing and transmitting information.
Books have managed to survive radio, film and television—they make such handy foundations for scripts, after all—and there’s no reason they can’t survive a wholesale conversion to digital formats. A story’s a story’s a story, right? Everyone I know who owns an e-book reader swears that once you start reading, the story takes over and you don’t notice the format at all.
I believe it, too—for most books, anyway. (I think picture books and heavily illustrated nonfiction need paper in a way that novels probably don’t—even those novels with spot art. Heck, for the next few generations of e-book readers, Garth Williams’s illustrations for Charlotte’s Web will be restored to their pre-colorized black-and-white perfection, which makes early conversion to digital a real plus.) Those of us with limited shelf, floor, end-table and kitchen-counter space will benefit enormously from e-books, goodness knows.
But—and you knew this was coming—I recently unpacked a “Celebration of the First Edition” of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, timed cannily to come out this month to mark the 59th anniversary (go figure) of its publication. Now, this does not ring little bells of nostalgia for me; my first walk into the wardrobe was through the Yellow Submarine–esque early-’70s edition, which had a cover I thought then and still think unusually ugly.
But this facsimile edition is just plain adorable. Everything about it calls attention to its physicality, even the discordantly sleek “Harper” logo on the title page. Its understated, buff jacket is decorated with a medallion in which two fauns frame Susan and Lucy, pigtails flapping, on a galloping Aslan. Only two colors—ochre and green, both judiciously applied—adorn Pauline Baynes’s delicate ink drawing. Inside, a glossy full-color plate depicting Aslan playing with the girls is bound in as frontispiece.
The trim is cozy—5.25” X 8” as opposed to the more conventional (for children’s books, anyway) 5.75” X 8.5” sizing—and just begs for fingers to cuddle it. Even the typeface is perfect, the Baskerville blotching slightly where it bleeds into the page, the generous serifs curling as comfortably as steam from Mr. Tumnus’s teacup.
The words are the same whatever the vehicle, but I ask: Could pixels on a screen ever provoke such a swoon?
—Vicky Smith
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Copyright 2005 Kirkus Reviews
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November 15, 2009 - Lately in our reader-feedback inbox we've had a few pleas to split our Children's section into subsections based on audience age. I understand these readers' motivations: There are only so many minutes in a day, and to spend some of them reading reviews of books you don't work with can feel burdensome...But I have to say that simply putting together the Best Children's Books (in the Nov. 15 issue) and Best Young Adult Books (in the Dec. 1 issue) supplements this year was agony for me. While it's easy enough, I suppose, to declare Jerry Pinkney's glorious "The Lion and the Mouse" a children's book and Nick Burd's edgy-in-the-extreme "The Vast Fields of Ordinary" a YA book, drawing the line got pretty arbitrary
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