THIS IS A LOVE STORY

Dedicated to Gee Lillian

“This is a love story. It’s about the good old days, when men were men and women were women (Whatever that means. Even Hemingway raised questions, but that is another story.) and books were books, with glued or even sewn bindings, cloth or paper covers, with beautiful or not so beautiful jackets and a musty, dusty, wonderful smell; when books furnished a room, and their contents, the magic words, their poetry and prose, were liquor, perfume, sex, and glory to their devotees. These loyal readers were never many but they were always engaged, always audible and visible, alive to the romance of reading. Perhaps they still exist underground somewhere, hidden fanatics of the cult of the printed word.

For these happy few, literature was life, and the slowly burning pages on which it took shape were the medium of their cult. Books were revered, cherished, hoarded, collected, given, and sometimes borrowed, though seldom returned…”

Muse by Jonathan Galassi