Last weekend I spent a few hours wandering through the Small Publishers Fair in London, where tables of hand-bound chapbooks, risograph zines, and small press essays lined Conway Hall like devotional offerings to the printed word. There was something really wonderful about it: a room buzzing not with algorithmic chatter, but with paper, ink, and the human hand.
Lately, this question of preserving ideas has been preoccupying me. As I’ve been working on my forthcoming projects—both scholarly and personal—I’ve found myself turning again to the physicality of books, not just as containers of knowledge but as archives of consciousness. The handmade box-making I’ve been experimenting with at home (a small project that began as a way to store my growing stack of old notebooks) has become a kind of meditative practice: measuring, cutting, folding, gluing, all in careful rhythm. It’s taught me something about form and memory—about how enclosure can protect, but also invite reverence.
Walter Benjamin once wrote that every book has a double life: one as a vessel of ideas, and another as an artefact that carries the traces of its readers. Marginalia, stains, folded corners all become evidence of encounter. When I teach or write about modernism, I’m always struck by how that movement both exalted and feared this materiality. Woolf, Joyce, and their contemporaries wanted language to transcend its own physical limits, yet they depended utterly on print.
My own shelves are full of books that now hold more of me than of their authors, filling with underlinings, exclamation marks, and the occasional coffee ring or grease smear. They are records not only of what I’ve read, but of who I was when I read it. In a sense, they preserve moments of thought—snapshots of consciousness mid-formation. To lose those, or to surrender entirely to digital ephemerality, would be to lose something essential about how we think in time.
There’s a similar intimacy in the act of making. When I’m gluing the corners of a handmade box or rolling out pastry dough, I notice how my thinking slows, finds rhythm in repetition. Craft requires patience, but it also invites reflection—it’s an embodied philosophy. David Pye, in The Nature and Art of Workmanship, distinguishes between the “workmanship of risk” (where every action could alter the outcome) and the “workmanship of certainty” (where machines guarantee precision). The handmade book, like the handwritten note, belongs to the first category: it lives in the space of risk, imperfection, and care.
In an era of constant digital revision, the printed page still says: this is what I thought, then. It invites us into a conversation with our past selves. Even my old notebooks, boxed and labelled, feel like small dialogues across time—some pages embarrassedly naive, others startlingly prescient.
There’s a line from Italo Calvino that I often come back to: “The classics are those books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to go away and when they hide in the folds of memory.” I think the same could be said of our own notes, letters, recipes, and marginalia. They refuse to go away; they wait patiently for us to rediscover them.
At the Small Publishers Fair, I was reminded how vibrant this world of small-scale making still is. Stalls dedicated to poetry, philosophy, and experimental art books, each one a testament to the persistence of the tactile imagination. Many of the presses represented there are acts of devotion, sustained by people who believe that ideas deserve bodies. To hold one of their books is to participate in a lineage of care: the slow publishing ethos that values depth over reach.
In the evenings lately, with autumn deepening and the smell of spiced raisins still in the kitchen, I’ve found myself reflecting on what it means to live archivally, or, to put it another way, to be a steward of one’s own thought. It’s a gentle calling, really: to keep what matters, let go of what doesn’t, and tend the rest with attention.
So whether you’re keeping a commonplace book, baking from a family recipe, or printing a limited-run essay for a small press, you are participating in this broader human act of preservation. You’re ensuring that thought continues to have texture—that it lives in the world not just as code or content, but as something we can touch, smell, and remember.
And maybe that’s what the physical book still teaches us, in its quiet way: that ideas, like relationships, need form to flourish. They ask for bodies, boxes, bindings, and for the gentle friction of being held.
UPCOMING EVENTS
If this resonates, you might enjoy joining one of my upcoming gatherings:
- Stopping the Drama Cycle: A Workshop on Love & Our Limiting Patterns: Online, 3 November, 7.00-8.30pm (UK time)
- Practical Miracles: Practicing the Course Beyond the Book: Online, 8 November, 2pm-5pm (UK time)
Discover more from Allan Johnson, PhD
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