This week we read Professor Pressman’s Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age Intro and Chapter 1 and honestly, very fascinating and intriguing. I know we have discussed bookishness in class before but I feel as though this introduction and first chapter made me understand it even more and honestly, I see myself as a bookishness person and I never realized it and I also never realized how much we truly do fetish this object. I also never realized that our deep love for books also change how we craft the book like its physical aspect which is what professor Pressman talks about in her work. “Bookishness affects literature not only at the level of content and story, but also in form and format.”(Pressman 22). This sentence made me remember about our times in special collections where we would see a lot of great books that didn’t really LOOK like books. We saw how someone made a story with a can, as well as a copy of Dracula no more than maybe half an inch big and wide as well as a constellation book that folded into pyramids which are 3D shapes. We as a society love this object so much that we are willing to break the rules of how a book should be created physical as well as written “appropriately” because changing the formatting and format of a books content is a huge deal and is something that should not be overlooked at all. Content is important, but we must ask ourselves as to why our author created this book the way they wanted and why did they decide to format the content into weird formats. Format and formatting is something that has interested me from the start of class because I have read countless books where authors tend to let their creativity run loose with formatting. I always found it “unformal” as a child when I read books with those formats and I often labeled them as books not worth reading since they became silly in my eyes. Seeing it now though, its creative liberty and freedom of expression which I think is beautiful and something that should not be overlooked which is ironic considering its a physical aspect in which you are constantly looking at when reading.

Looking back at my life, I remember reading pop-up books, but never really asked myself as to why it was created that way or rather; how someone was obsessed with books so much that they wanted to literally bring it to life. Books are great and seeing how humanity is obsessed with them(me too) I cant wait to see what people are going to share later down the line!