Books Are Worlds

Books are their own worlds. Those of us who love them know about that. We can't imagine life without the printed page. We dream about them, maybe even dream about making more of them. From my vantage point in publishing, I see each book with a life of it's own. Some books have very long lives that point to immortality, others die in conception or are never fully dreamed, and others, rightfully or mistakenly, die within a few short years having hardly been discovered or given their rightful attention.

Books venture from the personal to the collective nature of reality. Print allows the internal and personal to be shared on a mass scale. But it must be personalized by the individual to be appreciated. It must be absorbed one letter, word, paragraph and page at a time. That's where the weakness of a book's architecture lies. It has active qualities that remain static without engagement.