Best known for his first novel (Lord of the Flies) and his final trilogy of allegorical sea tales (collectively known as To the Ends of the Earth), British novelist William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983. He originally delivered this encomium to the book in a lecture in 1976--well before the arrival of laptops, Kindles, e-books, and other competitors to what Golding calls "physical books."
from "A Moving Target"*
by William Golding (1911-1993)
What a piece of work is a book! I am not talking about writing or printing. I am talking about the codex we may leaf through, that may be put away on a shelf for whole centuries and will remain there, unchanged and handy. We are so accustomed to crediting books with personality you will forgive my excursion into the pathetic fallacy when I speak of books as lying to hand with the obedience and humility of all harmless and useful beings. Of course, in a large library or bookshop we may see hundreds of yards of books and mutter, "Good God--who would want ever to add to that lot?" But this is the reaction of surfeit. The book, the stack of conveniently arranged pages, is an invention, in its physical nature as near as anything can be to remaining beyond criticism. We have them so often before our eyes that we tend to forget the ingenuity concealed in their apparent simplicity. Our world is voracious and still becoming more so. Sooner or later, unless we exercise a care and forethought which is seldom evident in the mass of human beings, we shall be left with little more than village or small town economy. It is worth noting, therefore, that the making of books can be a cottage industry. If the need is there, anyone could learn that careful swirl of the tray and flick of the wrist that distributes the pulp evenly over the mesh and gives us handmade paper. Flax, leather, cotton, silk--the heart warms at the thought of them in our era of alloys and plastic. I say this because I sometimes hear people say that the age of the book is past; and I suppose these statements to come from people who have a couple of thousand television sets on their shelves. But it will be a very advanced village industry that can manufacture a television set. Tapes, cassettes, records, radios, television sets are with us, certainly; but he would be a wise man who could predict how long we shall be able to afford them. Nor have these objects beauty in themselves. I think of a book that I bought for a few pence, second-hand. It is the Odyssey, published in 1800. It is printed on handmade paper and in the most exquisite Greek fount of the early eighteenth century. I do not collect books for their rarity or beauty but I come across such books sometimes. That one is a delight not just to the eye and the intellect but to the hands, with its leather binding, still supple after more than a hundred and seventy years. A luckier friend bought for only a few pounds a book within a few years of being five hundred years old. I held it in my hands, opened it, and the immense words were there, still clearly to be read on the near-white page.
Would that the ship Argo had never sailed--As long as we value the simple and the durable, the unobtrusively convenient, we shall make books available to us. For they will hold in perpetuity something as dull as a date or as proud as a poem. There lies, perhaps, some tedious record; or there will blaze out at us some passionate expression of the human spirit, not dulled or obscured by time, but clear as ever it was. As long as we are physical human beings with an inclination towards the acceptance of physical convenience and with a pleasure in touch and sight, there will be physical books.
Selected Works by William Golding
- Lord of the Flies, novel (1954)
- The Inheritors, novel (1955)
- Pincher Martin, novel (1956)
- The Brass Butterfly, play (1958)
- Free Fall, novel (1959)
- The Spire, novel (1964)
- The Hot Gates, essays (1965)
- Darkness Visible, novel (1979)
- Rites of Passage, novel (1980)
- The Moving Target, essays (1982)
- The Paper Men, novel (1984)
- Close Quarters, novel (1987)
- Fire Down Below, novel (1989)
*"A Moving Target" by William Golding was originally delivered as an address to Les Anglicistes, Rouen, France, on May 16, 1976. A slightly revised version of the lecture was included in the collection A Moving Target, published in 1982 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
