If she makes one wrong move, Sophia Bogle will snuff out a lifetime of joy and wonder and memories in an instant.
She moves the knife blade carefully, knowing a single slip could be fatal.
…are the stakes really that high? It depends on your perspective. Sophia Bogle is a book restorer.
Cut to mid-shot of Sophia at her workbench. She’s been restoring a vintage copy of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’. After trimming the old pages back to size, she’s reached the final step: recasing, or reattaching the hardcover to the text block. Her face lights up.
“This is the most fun part… you can write things on the spine.”
She grabs the lid of her pen with her fist, yanks it apart. In spidery letters, on the stitched edge, the bit probably no one else will ever see once it’s been glued back in place, she writes:
This book restored by Sophia Sept 2023
“And then my signature is, I always put three dots on.” She dabs in the points of a triangle. “I do love the fact that there’s the story in the book, there’s the story of the restoration of the book, there’s the story of who has owned the book, and now I’m just in there just a little bit more.”
In a world where every piece of writing ever published is accessible at the double-tap of a button, why books? What’s so special about this frankly outdated vehicle for the written word?
There’s a pragmatic reason books still have their place. These days, anyone can click “Publish”, but that’s not the same thing as having something published.
Any publishing house worth its salt will make sure editors, proofreaders, and fact-checkers see their books before the public ever does. It’s a crucial step that means, in theory at least, what’s been written is decent quality and contains nothing misleading – and it’s a step usually skipped when it comes to writing on the internet.
Yet what’s really significant about books is this: they’re for everyone.
We’re often led to believe you can only get on in life if you’re intelligent. But being intelligent and being well-read are two different things. Some of history’s most successful people weren’t particularly brainy, but they knew things – and all it takes to follow in their footsteps is a little effort.
Many things are closed off to you if you’re poor, or working class, or otherwise marginalised. Books aren’t one of them. And if you can open a book, you can ignite your imagination or deepen your understanding of the world or, conceivably, change your life.
If there is a shortcut, a “hack”, to becoming well-read, it’s this: read broadly.
Read novels from authors you haven’t even heard of. Read about topics to which you’ve never previously given a second thought. Read new classics, and old trash, and the books at the bottom of the bargain bin and the back of the charity shop, and the ones your dad or sister or office bestie recommended to you with breathless enthusiasm. Because:
If you spend a lifetime reading only, say, musical histories, you’ll become a subject-matter expert, and people have built entire careers off the back of that kind of knowledge. But the flipside of having such a narrow frame of reference is you can end up a dinner-party bore. Better to know a little about a lot.
Building a bookshelf full of variety is the best way to fill your life with variety too. It’s never too late, or too early, to begin.
For Sophia Bogle, no matter what they contain, books are indispensable. She’s sat in front of her own bookshelf now, talking to the interviewer from Wired.
“I’m preserving cultural history. It’s really important. So many books are being thrown away.” She punctuates each point with a gesture. “I want more people to collect books, to think about that: what can you collect? What can you put on your shelves, and take care and take stewardship of, so that they’ll make it to the next generations?”
Are books really worth saving? It depends on your perspective. Just know that if you ever want a different perspective, about this or anything else, your local library has pages full of them.
Until next time,
Adam Kay
