If the book ain’t broke, don’t flip it
Miniature volumes are too much like reality
Over the weekend, I saw what must be one of the most beautiful books in the world: Etienne Chevalier’s Book of Hours, a 15th-century illuminated manuscript painted by Jean Fouquet. Sadly, the book has been broken up. The surviving pages are split between Paris, London, New York and Chantilly. The château at Chantilly has the lion’s share — 40 pages — and it was here that I saw the detailed scenes that Fouquet painted of the life of Christ and the terrible martyrdoms of the saints.
Each gleaming, goldleafed page had almost the same dimensions as the paperback I had in my handbag. It is an elegant, finely proportioned format that has done readers proud for more than 500 years: from the Renaissance to this year’s Booker Prize winner.
But the days of the upright book may be numbered. Goodbye Guttenburg, hello Dutch dwarsligger. The dwarsligger — dwars: crossways, liggen: a person or thing that stands out — is a little book, printed in small, landscape type, on paper as thin as onion skin. These books are the size of an iPhone and as thick as a thumb.
Dwarsliggers are read by flipping the pages upwards — as if scrolling through Twitter or Instagram — rather than by turning the leaves from right to left, and have been published in the Netherlands since 2009.
Dutton, an American imprint of Penguin Random House, have now renamed them “flipbacks” and have printed four young adult novels by the bestselling John Green (The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns) in dwarsligger style. It is hoped that these flipbacks will draw teenagers off Snapchat and inside the covers of a story.
“Young people are still learning how they like to read,” Mr Green told the New York Times. “It is much closer to a cellphone experience than standard books, but it’s much closer to a book than a cellphone. The whole problem with reading on a phone is that my phone also does so many other things.”
Too true, that last bit. I’ve never come to grips with reading on my phone. The wonderful thing about a book-book rather than an iBook is its quiet certainty. There are the author’s words, chosen, considered, careful, unchangeable: still points in a turning world.
Where I part from Green and the Flipbackers is in the need for a new sort of book altogether. Watching an animation of a flipback in action, I was reminded of the little books we drew at primary school where a cartoon man fell off a cliff or rose in a hotair balloon if you flicked the pages fast enough. But reading isn’t a race. Books ask you to take your time, to think. They work just fine.