philip arnold
EX LIBRIS: A WORD HOARD
“There is creative reading as well as creative writing.”
—The American Scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson
My mother reads books at an alarming rate, although you may never notice. Because it has become so much a part of who she is, and how she inhabits space, there appears no division between her attention to the world around her and to the world within her books. A wisp of her hair is the only thing that separates these concurrent narratives.
My mother would gather a stack of novels at the library in the small town in which she lives, having just returned the stack she had checked out weeks before. Since she is no longer able to leave her house due to health issues, the librarian brings them to her now. One evening, the librarian arrived at my mother’s door with nine books, and told her she would be back in three weeks. My mother asked if she could return in two.
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My world, too, feels engulfed by words. Unlike my mother’s approach, though, mine feels disjointed, fragmented and circular. My readings are too often an autopsy: I pry and loosen and lift the lines, glean the laden from the miscellany, extract what glimmers. Books on history and the natural environment, an assortment of poetry and essays whose volumes skew toward the nineteenth century, and the occasional novel are my spiraling convergences of self and story.
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In the several moves before I built my house, my library moved with me. My books were my yoke. They were my manifest, enacting their rows across wood planks and cinderblocks. For many years in my twenties, books comprised the bulk of my scant possessions. I bought them when I could afford them, and puzzle pieced together a personal canon from secondhand stores, whose rows and rows contained donated volumes of the deceased, quick re-sales post-college graduation, and easements of spatial limitations.
This is also to say that the bulk of my library has come by happenstance. A used bookstore offers no certainties of titles or authors on its shelves. To find the right book in one feels like a willful coincidence, a tenuous confluence of preference and proximity. My library is seeded by these acts of chance—an expanding host to my own and many a book’s peregrinations.
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I open my old leather-bound books to commence their enchantment. Displayed on a side table next to my fireplace, these oldest of my books expand the ecosystem of genres and typesets and topics within my library. I no longer prune the branches; the understory of philosophy clamors for the shadowing crown of history above. Poetry creeps and invades. This trope has roots in the glossary of books, where pages are referred to as leaves. A leaf is a single sheet bound in a book, which accounts for two pages—the first page called the recto, and the page on the backside of the leaf, the verso. A grouping of folded leaves is called a gathering.
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Each book is a semblance of the library in which it is a part. Books partake of my living room’s volume—they fill in the corners, lower the ceiling, bring the walls into cohesion—and in their span and elevations, appropriate the room’s geometry. Rectangular forms prevail: a confluence of right angles articulates both book and shelf and room. As they enact continuities of variation, books align as fractals in the host room, subtle iterations of plane and angle. Structurally, a book is a rectangular prism, which offers both a perimeter and a circumference—a sum of its closure and a volume of its contents, respectively.
Speaking broadly, both shelved and scattered clusters of books in my house provide an infrastructure for the dimension of my life most invested in the imagination. This, though, says nothing of the geometry of solitude—the handmaiden of books. Or the geometry of daydreams—its inducement.
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The composition of a book, in its material sense, is mutable. An object of physical properties, a book is an earthy body, whose narrative of decline may underscore the transcendent tenure of its words. In time, as cellulose and lignin in wood pulp decay and chemical compounds break down, words become scented with aromas.
A 2009 study published in Analytical Chemistry, “Material Degradomics: On the Smell of Old Books,” identified that the unique scent resulted from hundreds of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released into the air from the paper. “A combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness, this unmistakable smell is as much part of the book as its contents,” states Matija Strlic, the lead scientist behind the study.
Some VOCs break down faster than others. The scent of vanilla comes from vanillin, benzaldehyde and furfural create hints of almond, and a light floral fragrance is produced by 2-ethyl hexanol.
My guess is that those who frequent used bookstores have an attraction to the scent of old books—wafts of cinnamon and vanilla and coffee among the labyrinth of bookcases. I know the scent induces in me reveries of readerly solitude and the intoxicant of discovery. Does the scent draw us back into these stacks and dim spaces to ensure their survival? Blossoming plants, like lavender hyssop, with its honey-anise scented flowers, as well as lilac, phlox, and honeysuckle, produce fragrances that attract bees and butterflies. It is a thought, at least, to draw the parallel: an old book perfumes the air, our eyes alight once again on its words, the register rings, and the cycle of bookstore and reader and book is re-engendered.
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PHILIP ARNOLD CREATES NARRATIVES ACROSS SEVERAL MEDIUMS, EXPLORING CREATIVE POSSIBILITIES AT THE JUNCTION OF IMAGE AND TEXT. IN ADDITION TO PHOTOGRAPHY AND DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING, HE WRITES POETRY AND NONFICTION PIECES ROOTED IN THE BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS OF NORTH CAROLINA. HIS ESSAYS HAVE APPEARED IN GULF STREAM, NORTH DAKOTA QUARTERLY, FUGUE, AND APT— WITH WORK SELECTED AS NOTABLE IN BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS. HE IS THE AUTHOR OF THE POETRY COLLECTION THE NATURAL HISTORY OF A BLADE (DOS MADRES PRESS 2019). HIS POEMS HAVE APPEARED IN ARTS & LETTERS, IOWA REVIEW, ATTICUS REVIEW, AND RATTLE, FOR WHICH HE RECEIVED AN INDIVIDUAL EXCELLENCE AWARD FROM THE OHIO ARTS COUNCIL. HIS DOCUMENTARY FILMS HAVE SCREENED AT DOCUTAH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, ATHENS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, LONGLEAF FILM FESTIVAL, AND OTHERS.