WAN AHMAD HULAIMI: Elsewhere
History resides forever between pages of old books

2009/11/01

By WAN AHMAD HULAIMI

EXAGGERATE if you must, but it isn't the death of printed books just yet.

It is inevitable that as the "electronification" of our daily lives continues apace books will be its next target, now scanned, now Googled into a massive online repository, and now the next big thing: downloadable text that pours into a compact box made to look just like, but isn't quite yet, a book. Just a reading box with a book-like page.

I grew up around the printed text: hardbound books and old kitab handwritten in Jawi script, magazines of all sorts. I remember the US edition of the Readers Digest going back to the 1950s, and comic books, and a magazine called Wide World that our uncle kept in his cupboard.

Our father kept old newspapers, some, like the Warta Jenaka, were bound together by his friend at the Government Printing Office.

He read the Straits Times (as it then was) too, and the Jawi dailies, and he sat most nights with loose pages from his kitab in evening lessons at the mosque, and he read and cut out bits and scraps in files that held his crop of eclectic thoughts. He read, but he was more a collector than a reader, I should say, and I am thankful to him for that.

He built overhead bookcases pinned to tall columns in our house, and I remember almost every title that they held. One was a hefty tome by John Buchan called The Island of Sheep (I never read it, it was too big).

I grew up knowing the feel of paper in a book, the smell of wood pulp as it aged between covers, and in some way that is real or imagined, I can claim to have "felt" the link in text between me the reader and the person in some distant place who wrote the work.

Sometimes, in writing workshops, I urge people to be destructive. Tear pages out of a book, I would tell them, and read them in those quiet moments on the bus, in the train or at lunchtime while munching a sandwich, even if I myself would be rather loath to tear pages from a book. Like father, I have become a collector of books and scraps, but tearing out pages to carry and read is my prescription for anyone with a fear of the "formidable" work, or a shyness about reading a book.

And it isn't even an original idea at that; it was recommended by Dale Carnegie some 50 years ago in one of his many hugely entertaining works.

Like playing virtual tennis, reading from a screen that is made to appear like the page of a book is simulation. You have to touch and smell and feel a book and turn its pages and let them conjure up fabulous thoughts in your head; and there's no substitute for that.

I pick up a book from the shelf in our family library and see inscriptions by our grandfather in its flyleaf and the medium immediately becomes the message, from the writer so far away, from our grandfather who held and read and wrote in the white spaces of the book. You cannot get this from a sanitised digital file in a box.

OLD FRIENDS

GIVE a really old book to Dr Russell Jones and he'll put its pages against the light, as shopkeepers do with 50-ringgit notes. At London University Russell was known for his skills in detecting watermarks, and he has also been a lifelong collector of books, many in the Malay language.

So when we recently met our conversation naturally turned to hardcovers and paperbacks.

I longed to hold some books again, I said, those I have not seen since days when I was still in shorts.

Name me some, Russell said, so I rummaged through dustier shelves in my mind and came out with the Kitab Kiliran Budi, Bayan Budiman and Canai Bacaan, three great-grandfathers of our Malaysian school texts that father used to keep on his shelves.

I'll see what I can do, Russell said, folding the scrap of paper that he was scribbling on as I spoke.

A week later, from a thick envelope that plopped on our doormat, I pulled out a copy of the Bayan, edited by R.O. Winstedt, with pencilled annotations in Russell's hand from different periods of his life: when he was learning Malay and when he taught it at London University.

I had not just a dog-eared old friend in my hand, but I smelt the smell and heard the rush of sounds of many years.

I also connected with parts of Russell's life, and Winstedt's, and of the Malaya Publishing House Ltd, which, according to Russell's annotation, was in Singapore's Stamford Road.

Russell's Bayan Budiman, now mine, reverberates like the homeopathic molecule, with memories of everything that it'd rubbed shoulders with.

Weightless electronic words unravelled in a box?

No thanks, we would be the poorer if a book comes sans watermark, sans ghosts, sans people and places of its past.

Veteran London-based writer and journalist Wan Ahmad Hulaimi is also known as 'Awang Goneng', author of Growing Up in Trengganu. His column here debuts this week, and he can be reached at elsewhere@columnist.com