Have Books Souls?

Do the Volumes on the Shelves Demand Consideration?

Books, we are credibly informed, have souls. So, in all probability, have houses, towns, vegetables, hair nets, tin cans. In the case of books, however, the situation becomes more acute. The soul of a book tends rather to force itself upon the reader. One is led to wonder what other qualities noble or ignoble the unassuming volumes on our shelves share with the existing lords of creation. Have books feelings, sensibilities, all those little emotional refinements which make of life so deli cate an adventure? No one wants to hurt a book's feelings. Are they sensitive? Have they their petty vanities, their secret aspirations, disappointments?

Books are not, in a sense, taciturn. A quite simple gesture may suffice to bring forth a perfect volume of verbosity from the most unassuming. But they are at a disadvantage. A book is quite incapable of button holing you. At any moment it may be reduced to completely submissive silence by the reader's merely turn ing away his head. But does all this reticence imply a Spartan fortitude, hiding intolerable pain?

In the ordinary bookcase, the in habitants thereof may be subjected to inconceivable indignities. Imagine the reaction of a prim and high-minded Victorian romance forced to rub Covers with Jurgen. What would be the feelings of Speare and Fitz gerald, twin apostles of gin and kisses, separated by the staid blue covers of Mr. Gundelfinger's uproarious Ten Years at Yale?

Alphabetical arrangement of the bookcase is the occasion, of course, of obvious indignities and incongruities. F. Scott Fitzgerald and the translator of Omar might, it is true, find a common meeting jug, but it is hard to conceive of Shakespeare or Shelley mushing up the Yukon with Robert W. Service, or of Thomas Gray passing the time of day with Eddie Gest.

Some volumes, having attained patriarchal age, may not impossibly be granted a dignified privacy in the chill seclusion of a Vault or behind a wire mesh, but they suffer correspondingly in that they are thus completely cut off from the reading world. After all, a book must necessarily cherish a yearning to perform its function of imparting its con tents. There is little satisfaction in social position per se if no one bothers to find out how it was attained.

The deaths of books are nearly always tragic. Either they are destroyed by violence or they suffer a lingering dissolution. How the younger volumes must look up to the martyred Aeschylus, found -- wet and bedraggled -- in the pocket of the drowned Shelley! J.A.T.