As retired persons we have a lot of time for reading. Like many retired folks, we are 'over fifty,' and like many folks over fifty we are slow to pick up the concept of leisure reading on a computer. We like reading Ink on paper. It takes us back to our childhood.
As we wander farther from home where English speakers dominate, we find it harder to find books in English. We usually do not pay for them, but trade for them at book exchanges that may be as formal as a library in a hotel or as informal as a gathering in the cockpit of a cruising boat.
These books tend to be in poor condition, particularly those that have been at sea for a while. They have been passed from hand to hand for years, some for decades. Coffee stains are often the least of the insults they suffer. Dousing with water is common, both fresh and salt. Mildew soon follows. They get torn in falls and may delaminate due to repeated use or plain old age. One humiliation never before contemplated occurred to a copy of Crime and Punishment this morning when a friend on a departing boat passed close to where we are anchored and threw the book ship-to-ship. We call it air mail.
Some smokers also read books and I can tell which books they read from quite a distance. These I avoid unless it is a particularly delicious title or I am desperate. They are read outside and held downwind. These are the dirtiest of the dirty books.
We consumers of printed pages (usually) treat them respectfully, often making amateur attempts to tape or glue them back together. However tattered and patched, each one is a treasure to be autographed with location, boat name and passed on to another sailor with a one sentence review and an apology that it is not the genre he or she prefers.
These are the agonies visited on us, the vestiges of a nearly forgotten era as we approach the ends of the earth. It could be worse. What if there were no e-books?
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