You derive a special pleasure from a just-published book, and it isn’t only a book you are taking with you but its novelty as well, which could also be merely that of an object fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacket begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the binding becomes dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries.
—Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler
Back so soon, Calvino? Yes, because his writing is beauty itself. Invisible Cities alone would have been a masterpiece worth any author’s lifetime, yet Calvino has equaled himself with On a winter’s night a traveler. (Yes, that’s the way the title is properly capitalized, and it makes sense in the context of the book.)
Although this selection seems like a lecture, that’s because you’re not drawn into the book. The “you” here isn’t an audience, it’s actually you, because the novel is written in the second person. Although Calvino was well known as a postmodernist, this passage as a whole has a very Proustian freshness to it. It has a beauty of its own, but what makes this stand out as an exemplar of beauty is the end as it wraps up with the “rapid autumn of libraries.”
This hits doubly for me as I am reading this book as an old library copy from 1995, well worn with signs of shelf wear in the form of the small creases you can see on the cover above, and with the slight yellowing of pages that comes with books printed before acid-free paper became the standard.
It also comes with that bugaboo of public library books, marginalia. The rest of the book is clean, but some reader among the many it has obviously had over the last 31 years it has stood sentry on the shelves of the West River branch of the Elyria Public library decided to summarize the sections:
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