'About the perfect book' by Cristina A Schumacher

I caught myself wondering what a perfect book - the physical thing we hold in our hands while we read - would look like. I imagined what magic traits it would need to have to hold us helplessly captive in the story it contains, if such traits could be made visible. And this is what occurred to me: with yellowish pages and dirty bottom right corners from being leafed through over and over – after all, it would have been read countless times - the perfect book would not have a single word printed on it. It would be all blank, with the story it tells getting told as it is read. 

The lines – the words, spaces between words, punctuation and identation – would appear as the story developed. With every new line, each reader would have something added to the story that would be told exclusively to them. And there would be something about this book that would make it universal, cozy. Perhaps the fact it's old, perhaps its smell (the smell of second hand bookshops and libraries), or its weight (it's heavy, the story it tells is always long, almost endless). Something about it would make it familiar, because the perfect story at a time sends us back to paths we have all walked in one way or another and shows us a new way of walking those same paths. It's about familiarity and novelty fused together. 

The most attractive stories stay because they interweave with our own – familiar, internal -  story. So the blank old book would be a pocket one we've kept with ourselves for long enough we could even recall how this dot on the cover or that stain on the summary page came to be. The lines get written and read anew. And since good stories are subtle, with the unexpected keeping our attention via carefully strategized intent that counts on the reader's mental acts to be actualized, so the old blank book would be fragile. The reader would handle it with extreme care. They would want to read it to the end, so they could leave it in good blank condition on the shelf again and take their story lines with them, inside their hearts.

by Cristina A Schumacher

The Brit Writers Blog