I’ve been carrying around a little leather bound copy of the collected poetry of John Keats. It’s a little smaller than a trade paperback (though larger than a mass market paperback). It’s a beautiful piece of art and not the sort they make anymore. Leastways, I only ever see such things for sale in used bookstores.

My mother-in-law and father-in-law have been in town and the latter and I have been spending a lot of time together.

I don’t speak much Thai and he doesn’t speak a great amount of English (though vastly more than my Thai), but we both like to get out and about and do things. We went to see some museums over the weekend (the Library of Congress’ Jefferson Building and the National Gallery of Art) and I carried that copy of Keats with me, on account of it fitting so nicely into a coat pocket and on account of it always being a good time to read good poetry. When moments presented themselves, I pulled it out, opened it to the section marked by the satiny ribbon, and read snippets of Endymion.

I do wonder that, as the e-books over take books, will books like my Keats come back? As physical books become as much objets d’art as anything else, will little, beautiful things like this come back into fashion? But will that also presage the end of something else? After all, don’t I love my collection of pulpy books, the symbol of a great error of mass publishing and also of mass reading?