A few months ago, I bought a watercolour set with the single goal of vandalising a book. This is a published book with text and illustrations. Beautiful ones too, parts of which have already been painted by the author. Now, normally I would have had the same horrified reaction to this as the person reading this write-up. After all, I was raised in a household that considered dog-earring books akin to public spitting and the idea of scribbling on a book, with anything other than a pencil, grounds for ex-communication. However, the book I'm talking about is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, whose writer starts off with the following advice:
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"Start in the middle, if you like. Scribble on it, crease the corners and leave it well thumbed." -Charlie Mackesy
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Before any of you point this out, yes, he doesn't explicitly mention painting with watercolours. Still, when I first read his warm invitation, it reminded me why I love turning the pages of a physical book over swiping through a Kindle's limited screen (not that I don't appreciate my Kindle and the compact library it made accessible to me on my days of commute).
This is my personal opinion but I do believe that a reader's interaction with a book is a telling exercise not just of the reader's habits but of the writer and their hopes for their creation. For example, with The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, the intention is not just to have people look at illustrations but to help them find a safe space. For the characters in the book, this safe space is in the friendship they build with each other. That is why the act of scribbling, doodling, even writing replies to the odd comments of the characters allows a certain childish peace you wouldn't otherwise find in a Kindle version. Moreover, scribbling helps one express, something that each of the characters struggle with (as they repeatedly remind us.) So in a way, by making use of the book's physicality, you end up tapping into its real potential.
Perhaps this argument may make more sense when one considers that The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is written by an artist. But honestly, it's the same with texts as well. Take Crime and Punishment, for example. People think that the book is hard to read but actually it is not. It's just that Dostoevsky never meant the book for idle reading. So, if you pick it up just to "cover all your classics," it's not going to work. Dostoevsky wanted the reader to really think, just like Raskolnikov did throughout his book. When I first started reading Crime and Punishment, I struggled with every page until I finally stopped treating it like a plain read, picked up a pencil and started marking things that annoyed, confused, shocked and at times impressed me about the book. And in doing so, I slowly started to understand Raskolnikov's angst.
We can segue from here into the practice of margin writing (something I have wholeheartedly embraced over the years) but to wrap up my point, sometimes scrawling in a book is about more than just desecrating a text. Books, at the end of the day, are tales written by folks who could never ethically, morally, dare I say even skillfully, narrate the real instances that inspired their stories. Perhaps, it is ludicrous to say this but; when walking through the aisles of a high-end bookstore, a roadside stall, a second-hand bookshop, thinking so reminds me to keep a look out, not for a smart book, but for the whispers of a person who had much to say but only had the strength to condense it to a single fable. That by some miracle now sits in my shelf, or on gentler days in my hands on a drab evening, while a sorry blanket covers my lap and a steaming bowl of noodles patiently gives me the support I need to break the rules of my house and "ruin" a good book.
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