A Real book.

I got this e-mail and picture a while back, and I thought I might share it.

Pat,

I don’t know if The Name of the Wind will survive long enough for me to
finish it!

My (Your? The? Our?) book arrived with the front cover ripped loose from
the binding. I figured that leaving the poor thing in a metal mailbox
for a day melted the glue or something. I live in a blast furnace, you
see, so I sort of expect mail-order stuff to be damaged.

That night I took my book with me into the bathtub which is dangerous, I
know. But nothing beats foo-foo bubbles and a good book I say, and even
if you drop the book in the tub it’s *usually* salvageable and smells
pretty too!

But THIS book stained my hands purple. I usually read paperbacks
because they are more manageable (and I’m cheap) but the few hardcovers
that I’ve taken along on bathtub adventures have never turned my damp
hands strange colors. Yours just hates me, I think.

And finally, I dropped it today and when it hit the floor, it just gave
up. The entire cover went one way, the pages went the other, and I said
a nasty word.

It’s been patched up with duct tape but I’m still wary. If it decides
to spontaneously combust or something I won’t be terribly surprised.

Thanks a lot, and I really am loving the book. :)

~Lisa~

I’m sure there’s a moral in this story somewhere, but I don’t know what it is.

I will admit that at one point in my life the thought of my book being destroyed would have filled me with mute horror. But that’s not really how I felt when I heard this story. This isn’t a book that was destroyed by Fedex. This was the story of a book that went down in the call of duty. This is the story of a brave soldier who fought the good fight.

With this in mind, I asked Lisa to send me a picture of the book and she was nice enough to oblige:

If I had any doubts, they were laid to rest by the Strawberry Shortcake band-aid. This book hasn’t been destroyed, it has been loved. This is the Velveteen Rabbit of books.

For those of you who live sad lives, here’s passage from the Velveteen Rabbit that explains what I’m talking about.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day[...] “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

This is a Real book.

Later all,

pat