Confessions of a Biased Book Lover

Books, like babies, are adorable. The moment you hold either of them, you feel a kind of happiness you had never felt before. It’s satisfying but also scary. You are grateful for it, but at the same time, there is a constant nagging and fear in your head to take care of it, lest it is harmed. Books and babies have another thing in common apart from being bundles of joy. No one talks of how they come into existence.

As far as babies are concerned, talking about their inception is a social taboo. And, even if the procedure that takes place after the inception is explained in details in Biology books of Class VII, Class X, and Class XII, the sterile words hardly make sense in the truest sense to a hopeless uninterested student like me. I am still unsure of what exactly happens once the egg is fertilized, zygotes probably formed, and something with fallopian tubes or maybe not. Like I mentioned, hopelessly uninterested. But, to save my soul, I now know that babies aren’t thrown down from the sky by a God playing “catch” or they aren’t given away as Christmas gifts in hospitals.

Books, on the other hand, do not have a censored inception. My lack of common sense and research in the field made me think that in publishing of books the only thing important is editing. A month ago, I could not have imagined what an IT sector might do in a publishing house or why do publishing people need an accounts department. Yes, I hadn’t thought about the process of publishing at all, or the working of a company for that matter, but I was lost in dreams of being in a publishing house. For me, it was all about reading new manuscripts, talking to authors, editing their manuscripts, meeting them for coffee to discuss the changes in their work before finalizing it. Either that or fetching espressos for the editor I might be working under. That’s all. Everything that an American movie can trick you into believing.     

      

When I entered a reputed publishing house thirty days ago, I hadn’t imagined what’s in store for me. I was so excited that I ended up being forty-five minutes early to office. By the end of the day, I didn’t want to come. No, it had got nothing to do with office. It was about giving up a comfortable life. It was about me, I had a severe lower back ache from sitting upright whole day. I realized that not doing anything can tire you more than any physical work. I had a lot of time to learn workings of departments. They gave me the basic idea alright. But, after briefings I used to wonder, what doubts could I possibly have about a subject I have no idea about with not enough time to start from the basic why(s) and how(s). And more than that, there were so many people around me and yet, no one to talk to. I couldn’t be either my ‘let’s be jolly and chat about the ideologies that govern us’ self or my ‘let me boss you around into doing things that need to be done’ self.  I had to be a very formal (read, awkward) person. I was just an intern in a big company with a schedule for the next month in hand, worrying if I could fight my own principles to fit into a place that I have been dreaming about for last three months. Despite that, every time I met people from different departments I was awe stricken. How can so many people be working on so many levels to bring about one book! 

At a Printing  Press

Having stated the similarities, there are two major differences between books and babies. Once inside the womb, you do not know how the baby will be, how it might look or if it might be deformed. But when it comes to books, everything is preplanned. There is an exact image of how a book should look, what size it should be, which paper should be used in it, how it should be bound, and for that matter, how exactly it should be put together to trick its target audience into buying it. This brings me to the second difference. Selling babies is illegal, and if you see they aren’t working fine, you cannot throw them away. When it comes to books, you have to sell them. What’s the point otherwise? Books after all are a profit and loss statements which I hadn’t thought before given my emotional involvement with them. As much as I would like to think that it would have been interesting to have books with no covers and blurbs, I do know that that’s not how capitalism functions. Selling isn’t the end of it, customer relations need to be maintained after sales. And when a book isn’t selling anymore, it has to be pulped.

Yes, I have a hard time writing the word ‘pulpled’. It is the right thing to do given every bit of space in warehouses matters and cannot be wasted on books that aren’t selling. When I visited the warehouse, all I kept thinking was how many books have been pulped, how is the pulping done. I couldn’t make myself ask people there even though they kept encouraging, if you have any doubts please ask us. When I finally did, I could have cried as they explained me how books are torn into pieces. Then and there, I felt, that if you have to be in the business of publishing books, you cannot afford to be attached to them.

As an intern, with the things that people won’t tell about books, I also learnt something about me. People interest me. I have listened to stories of different classmates, friends, acquaintances over the years. I used to believe that I am making up for not having a listener for my stories. That doesn’t seem like a whole truth anymore. More than how the company works, I was interested to know how the people working there came to work there. The ones who told me their journey of getting a job, mostly unexpectedly, or getting a treatment of a family in the company, those were the ones I couldn’t make myself get away from. It was interesting to know that, not many of them have a thing for books and yet, they were there. It made me wonder if we choose to work on things that we love, does the department take over the company when we decide to take up the job, or do we simply work in what we become good at over a period of time to pay our bills. Can any job be comforting or the financial security overpowers everything else? In others' stories, I was trying to find my place, whether or not I fit in.

As a twenty-three-year-old who is torn between applying for PhD and jobs, I am stuck with the thought that as much as we romanticize our relationship with books, in the end it is all about money. The books that make us aware about capitalism promote capitalism. I am sure, if I put so much thought into reproduction, I can associate it with money as well. I have been wondering if money really matters above everything else. Over the years all I have wanted to do is make people read. Of course, it is a choice, but it also widens the way we look at the world. That’s the only thing I knew about books.

And, the thing about books that no one talks of is that, they are dismissed categorically. As a modern day reader of fiction, I had completely dismissed school books as books, or for that matter books related to other subjects. Somehow loving books is limited to loving fictions or a few other genres. I literally wondered on my first day, who cares about school/course books? Let’s talk about novels. Can we genuinely say, that we are in love with books, all kinds of books? No, we have made a choice of genre and forgotten about everything else. Had I not entered a publishing house, I would have been under the clouds all my life. The thing that we do not say about books is that, we as book lovers are biased towards them. We are in love with what certain books hold inside them and how those stories make us feel. We don’t generally care about books as physical entities. Or, we do not care as much as we need to.