A DARKLING WOOD
The Pedant Class and Your Stars
IT’S not entirely true that money doesn’t grow on trees. Money is made of paper, after all, and paper comes from the bark of trees, so theoretically one should be able to stroll past any old oak and pick off a sheaf of notes.
Of course there is a great deal of other stuff that has to happen before money gets from bark to bank, same as there is before a book gets from the head of a writer into the hands of a reader.
Books — or at least the old-fashioned type of book that still wears a jacket to dinner — also come from trees. The French word for book is livre, which comes from the Latin librum, meaning “the inner bark of trees”. The word “library” has the same roots.
Both the English word “book” and the German Buch come from the Proto-Germanic bokiz, a beech tree.
There are two theories as to why books and beech trees are so closely related. One is that, before the invention of paper, runes were carved on tablets made of beechwood. How ironic that we have returned to a time when people transport their reading material on tablets.
Runes, incidentally, were secret messages carved in an ancient and mysterious alphabet, which most language scholars assume to be magic spells and the like carved by druids and their ilk. Others dispute this, saying the complex whorls and flourishes may simply have been shopping lists.
The second theory about why books come from beech trees is that the beech has a smooth and relatively soft surface, which made it the trunk of choice for those who wished to carve out public-service announcements such as “Adam and Eve were here” or, more latterly (because people still feel a compulsion to stick knives into trees), “Justin is my bae”.
Whether or not the e-book eventually replaces paper books is a matter of much debate. So far, the jacketed variety is holding on, but if there comes a time when all books are published electronically, the forested birthplace of the word “book” will be something of a linguistic oddity.
If books stop coming from trees, will trees stop growing in books? There are very few books that do not mention a tree of some sort. There are also countless books specifically about trees.
There are glossy coffee-table books about trees, such as Thomas Pakenham’s Remarkable Trees of the World and Colin Tudge’s The Secret Life of Trees. The subtitle of the latter book is How They Live and Why They Matter. I have not read it but I imagine point one in the list of why trees matter is that they provided the raw material for Tudge’s book. Incidentally, coffee tables — whether glossy or not — also come from trees, so it’s appropriate that they are twinned with books.
Trees are important in all sorts of other books. There’s the doomed one in Shel Silverstein’s morality tale The Giving Tree. There are the slow, bearded Ents in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the less controlled Whomping Willow in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books. In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, the allegorical trees start as insignificant weeds and grow into ravenous baobabs. There is Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree, Winnie the Pooh’s honey tree and Betty Smith’s novel about a tree that grew in Brooklyn.
Trees loom large in many a varied tale. Dr Seuss had a Lorax who spoke for the trees. Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha had his freefrom-desire epiphany in the shade of a Bodhi tree. And of course there is that apple tree in Genesis that caused all the trouble.
Perhaps, when books are no longer made of paper, trees will cease to be so important to our lives and literature. But I hope not. LS
If books stop coming from trees, will trees stop growing in books?