The granularity of print

distinguishes them from language left in other places.

There is something about the paper’s grain

and the coarse detail on the page that lends a full stop gravitas.

Your graffiti might be sophisticated and revolutionary,

but your scorn for Venus, your veneration of a dead rapper,

will never be as subversive, moving or as powerful

as the final paragraph of Kafka’s The Trial in its Everyman edition.

I like looking at ‘philanthropic’ and ‘conscientiousness’

and imagining what processes brought both to this place;

enveloped them between the other words

as though they are locked in the pulp—

the printer’s ink seems woven into the fabric of the paper

like the straw daubed onto a wattle wall;

the wood’s grain a palimpsest made

integral to the characters.

What is it about the words ‘Klebs-Löffler bacillus’,

when printed on a page of the New Oxford Dictionary of English,

that makes them seem as though they have always been

the closest of friends—brothers and sisters, even?

The characters, symbols and illustrations in books

typeset in hot metal, not by computer, were even weightier;

almost as though they might fall through the next page,

the entire book and its dustcovers.

When, in Hedwig Wiedemann’s signed 1886 copy

of Volume 2 of  Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1788-1833)

by Thomas Moore, published by Baudry’s European Library,

Byron petitions Mr Murray for “tooth-brushes,

powder, magnesia, Maccassar oil (or Russia)”,

we soon learn he could never content himself with toiletries;

he also had need of “a bull-dog, a terrier, and two Newfoundland dogs”,

not to mention copies of various rare and hard-to-find books.

I have no need for Gillian B. Cole’s copy of The Correct Guide To Letter Writing,

although it would be more useful than its sister, The Incorrect Guide.

Written, cryptically, by A MEMBER OF THE ARISTOCRACY,

in a typeface ennobled by curlicues, elegant descenders and ascenders,

it contains advice on writing To A Friend, Requesting a Loan;

A Lady to a Gentleman, declining a Proposal of Marriage;

From a Butler to his Master, giving Notice;

To a Bishop; and To His Majesty the King.

Sydney Moseley’s 18^th of April entry,

“Bought nearly new bike: £3. Pay by next Friday”,

is reproduced in the Faber Book of Diaries,

and seems invested with so much more urgency

than if it were a headline in the Daily Express,

more than if the words were written in fountain pen.

Those words might be accompanied by a peal of bells,

punctuated by a trumpet fanfare, rather than full stop and colon.

My foxed and moisture-ravaged copy of the fifty-ninth edition

of The Pears Cyclopaedia, published in Autumn 1949,

has a trustworthiness about it, undiminished by being out of date;

whether the subject is Wapping [industrl. Thames-side dist. East London]

or Active Bonds [bearing a fixed rate of interest payable in full from the date of issue].

It contains the Preamble to the Covenant of the Charter of the United Nations

and the words are as indelible as the numbers in the Pears Ready Reckoner,

from One-sixteenth of a Penny to Twenty-one Shillings.

Equally foxed is Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s On The Art of Reading, 1933.

In his twelfth lecture, from November 6, 1918, he writes that masterpieces

“raise your gorge to defend you from swallowing the fifth-rate, the sham,

                                                                                                                     the fraudulent”,

and the words are impressed so firmly on the page, your fingers can feel

the indentations made by the type, leaving no doubt about his sincerity.

The marginalia is so tentative, it is found only in pencil on the inside back cover;

as though no one would dare augment Sir Q.-C.’s words on the sublime

with anything more permanent or contextual.

The 1913 edition of Practical Guide To Health by Frederick M. Rossiter, BS, MD,

contains depictions of wet sheet packs (patient partly covered)

and a chapter on Tea, Coffee, Tobacco and Opium.

“When you drink tea, you are bringing a thief into the body”

makes you curious to read what he has to say about opium (not good).

But “Tobacco is a murderer” was prescient

and is stated in such widely spaced characters

that you are encouraged to carefully weigh each word.

The obscurity of a book’s theme cannot diminish the weight of real print;

And I do not need to be a bibliophile to be writing these words,

not even a bookworm or an avid reader;

it is not the book, the binding or the stock that moves me,

but the words laid out on the page

like ribbons of imagination joined by invisible thread

and mysteriously bonded with the molecules of paper,

as though a writer’s thoughts have been made substantial beneath my fingers.