Baltimore is always offering new and exciting ways to revive our culture. As we learned in past classes, it is important to stop and take a moment to visualize the beauty within the simple aspects of our society. This past Saturday I was able to do just that at the 22nd Annual Baltimore Book Festival. The festival was held downtown in the Inner Harbor and I have never seen so many books. As technology has slowly evolved throughout the years I have begun to turn to purchasing books on my I-Pad rather than purchasing the hard copy. Thankfully, this festival opened my eyes to the importance of purchasing the hard copy. As I spoke to one of the vendors with a few of my friends, I asked him how the industry is doing due to these technological advances and he expressed a sadness rather than a concern over the change in preference. He told me about the "hard cover book experience" and how digital versions just can't compare. Hard covers can be signed by authors, they can have the pages bent over to mark a spot, and most importantly they can be shared with friends or family. The book not only takes you into an alternative universe, but it creates an experience for the reader.
Everything we do in our lives is an experience, and in a way it could be argued that our life is an unfinished book, an unfinished future that we have the rest of our lives to write. I kept the vendor's words in my mind as I read our multiple readings for the week. William Wordsworth's I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud was the most relatable for me. His words are so captivating and truly helped me picture the narrators loneliness and ability to use his imagination to create his alternative universe. He escapes his loneliness by placing himself among nature with golden daffodils, with lakes, and trees while he is really on his couch alone, in solitude.
The Birthmark by Nathaniel Hawthorne speaks of the imperfections of society and more specifically, a woman. The beautiful woman had a birthmark that seems to intoxify her husband and intensify his need to remove it. He simply could not handle or accept the imperfections of his wife. This made me think about the dying culture of hard cover books and the experience they create. As each book is used over time, it accumulates multiple imperfections including; bent pages, speared ink, and scratches on the cover. Still, all of these imperfections are invisible to the reader once the love for the words on the inside comes about.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is also about a woman with a different type of imperfection. She has post-partum depression and much like in The Birthmark, her husband is trying to fix her imperfection. Being a physician himself, he prescribes bedrest and little to no activity which ultimately, results in her becoming un-motivated to be a part of society at all. Both of these pieces have a lot to do with one another in the way that they both talk about the imperfections of women., and still, it relates to books in so many ways. As the vendor at the book fair said, a book is an experience, yet, much like the wallpaper that the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper becomes fixated on, readers tend to quite literally judge a book by its cover. Because of this consumers tend to lean away from purchasing, or even reading the preview on the book to see if they have any interest in in the book.
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