Abstract
Why do people in the UK read and collect books when there are so many other sources of information and forms of storytelling available? What are the material and experiential bases of book love? People are attached to books because books are icons: they embody and enable the realisation of sacred cultural goods. Books do not simply communicate or signal social values or ideas. Aesthetic immersion in books’ materiality allows for these values to be realised. On the basis of the qualitative analysis of 43 interviews and 60 responses to the UK’s Mass Observation project, this chapter advances the cultural sociology of reading by bridging theories of iconicity and attachment and placing materiality at the centre of the analysis. The data are used to illustrate the powerful appeal of the practical fusion of three elements: the material, surface properties of books; the highly valued cultural goods that books represent and realise; and the act of reading.
Originally published as “Book love. A cultural sociological interpretation of the attachment to books” Poetics (2020) 81: 1–11. Reproduced with permission from Elsevier.
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Notes
- 1.
See the chapters by Annachiara Raia (7, in this volume) and by Eddy U (17 in this volume) for examples of aesthetic immersion in the cases of Swahili pamphlets read by Muslims in East Africa, in Raia’s case, and by Chinese clandestine readers during the cultural revolution in U’s case. On zines as iconic textual objects, see Ash Watson and Andy Bennett (Chap. 3 in this volume).
- 2.
Permission to use the Mass Observation material has been granted by the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex.
- 3.
The lists of interview questions and Nvivo nodes are available from the author upon request.
- 4.
I am thankful to one of the anonymous reviewers for the idea of books as boundary objects.
- 5.
The question posed in the Winter 2009 Directive of the Mass Observation project was “Do you think novels, and books in general (e.g. biographies, memoirs) give a better account of the events and characters they describe compared to newspapers, government reports or television programmes and so on? Give some examples if you think this is the case”. While I would not have formulated the question in this way, the responses are similar to those obtained in my interviews.
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Acknowledgements
Part of this research was funded by the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh through its Strategic Research Support Fund, SRSF.
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Thumala Olave, M.A. (2022). Book Love: Attachment to Books in the United Kingdom. In: Thumala Olave, M.A. (eds) The Cultural Sociology of Reading. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_6
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