Picture from Wikipedia & the National Portrait Gallery in London.
I bought a new book last week. It’s titled Letters on the Study and Use of History. By the late Right Honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke. Published in 1770.
It is officially my oldest book.
One of my hobbies is collecting the oldest books I can find. I currently have three published prior to 1800. Besides the one I just mentioned, I also have The Chirurgical Works of Percivall Pott, FRS. and Surgeon to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (Vol. II) published in 1783, and The World (Vol. III) by Adam Fitz-Adam published in 1789.
All three books are bound in leather, with damaged spines, and their lowercase ‘s’s look like ‘f’s.
There is something about old books that really resonates with me. Think about it: a book published in 1770 is older than the United States of America. It survived the revolution. The Civil War. WWI. WWII. Vietnam. 9/11. And all the big and small events that happened in between. And it will (hopefully) continue to exist long after the pandemic and me and you and whatever else happens in the world.
Most books are lost eventually. But the books that have not yet been lost hold not only the words, thoughts, knowledge, and feelings of someone who lived in a long-past century, but they hold whatever thoughts and feelings they were imbued with by those who purchased, owned, read, held, and loved that book.
They are telepathic time travel machines.
Honestly, holding old books for the first time makes me cry (and heaven forbid I end up in a library filled with old books—let the waterworks begin lol). I can’t help but think of all the people who loved that book, and how now I get a chance to love it before it passes onto someone else.
If magic exists, this is it.
I also can’t help but imagine that one day, my own books will end up in the hands of someone who loves old books. That a single copy of one of my books will make it 100, 200, 300 years into the future, far past when my own life has expired. Maybe it's a leather-bound special edition, or a well-loved, well-preserved paperback, or a digital one-of-a-kind edition built using an NFT.
I have spent a lot of time trying to visualize time as a four (or more) dimensional construct, and when I add books into my image, I see a spiderweb that connects the far past to the far future, and spreads out from person to person in an impossible complex and beautiful pattern.
From the late honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount of Bolingbroke: “The child hearkens with delight to the tales of his nurse: he learns to read, and he devours with eagerness fabulous legends and novels: in riper years he applies himself to history, or to that which he takes of history, to authorized romance: and, even in age, the desire of knowing what has happened to other men, yields to the desire alone of relating what has happened to ourselves. Thus history, true or false, speaks to our passions always.”
