Is, Was, and Will Be

A while back I noted reading In Thackeray’s London, written and illustrated by Francis Hopkinson Smith. I’ve since had the good luck of finding In Dickens’s London, published by Smith the following year, in 1914. The book, for which I paid a little under eight dollars, arrived in yesterday’s mail. It’s beautiful, both sturdy and aromatic, with its complex old-paper smell, the kind one might expect from having been unopened for the last fifty or hundred years. In this room there are many such volumes, and all contribute to an atmosphere in which I feel quite at home, part used bookstore, part library, part tomb. And yet here I sit, producing an electronic text, each entry with its own page number. Because they are pages. Because this is a book. Because I never rule out the possibility that everything here will find its way into print someday, even while I understand it can just as easily evaporate into thin air. Well — somehow, I found my way into print, with the flesh and bones to prove it; and someday I’ll find my way out again, and my type will be distributed and recomposed for an unrecognizable new edition. Yes, even my life, expressed in archaic typesetting terms. As it is, as it was, as it will be.

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