Books have long provided relief from life’s turmoils and disappointments. Every experience and feeling has been explained, attenuated, and cast through prisms of author perspective. We find ourselves through texture, tone, and pace that even the weakest writers can randomly parse into notes and chords that resonate through the web of human memory. Life has always been complex but it’s a relatively few anymore who rely on the printed word to understand their lives. Neither schools nor society seem to make those investments anymore.
The desire to understand yourself is world and species wide, although the printed word, a complex medium that takes time to learn, requires deep attention and comparative memory, to appreciate changes of timing and circumstance as the reader ages. Life’s lessons are on display in every interaction but complete stories, whether they are fiction or non, provide a sense of completeness that is almost always missing from day to day interactions. For those who prefer to understand the complete story they rely on books gathering the facts and develop their own opinions in context.
Fifty years ago this was common and expected.
Today however, books and book learning are in decline as the Internet, keyword searching and tweets are standing at center stage, parsing text, unearthing answers for homework while on the social media side conveying, cuts and slashes communicated as insults or bon mots that add nothing to understanding. It simply turns the acquisition of self-knowledge into potential blood sport.
Unfortunately insults leave scars while the empty-headed twits who launch them, move on mindlessly to inflict fresh damage to their next victims. Writers using the book form do a better job.
When it is repartee between consenting adults so be it. But our youth is also drawn into the fray and are rarely prepared to be humiliated and do not understand that humiliation is dangerous when your sense of self is yet settled.
Books are simply a safer place to discover and understand yourself.
As a family we have encouraged reading at an early age and I’ll be promoting educational choices for our grandchildren that focus on reading. The Internet comparatively, has transformed the world at the expense of truth, civility and fairness and brings risk and danger as baggage. Books are the far better medium.
So let 2023 be the year of reconsideration of the importance and power of the printed book. We are better, happier and safer citizens with the long form.
So I close this brief screed to express my thanks to writers and readers who make the world a better place.
Forum Auctions Fine Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper 28th May 2026
Forum, May 28: Book of Hours.- Heures de nostre dame a l'usaige de Romme, Paris, Antoine Chappiel pour Germain Hardouin, [1504]. £6,000-8,000
Forum, May 28: Colonna (Francesco). La Hypnerotomachia di Poliphilo, second edition, Venice, Sons of Aldus Manutius, 1545. £15,000-20,000
Forum, May 28:The Christ Child holding a crystal orb and surrounded by banderoles with devotional exhortations, on a leaf most probably from a Book of Hours, [Southern Netherlands, last decades of the fifteenth century]. £2,000-3,000
Forum Auctions Fine Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper 28th May 2026
Forum, May 28: Jackson (Shirley). The Haunting of Hill House, first English edition, signed presentation inscription from the author to Claude Fredericks, 1960. £2,000-3,000
Forum, May 28: Lennon (John). In His Own Write, first edition, first impression, signed by the author, 1964. £3,000-4,000
Forum, May 28: Doves Press.- Keats (John). [Poems], one of 200 copies on paper, Doves Press, 1914. £5,000-7,000
Forum Auctions Fine Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper 28th May 2026
Forum, May 28: Rodrigues (João Barbosa). Sertum Palmarum Brasiliensium, 2 vol., first and only edition, Brussels, 1903. £8,000-12,000
Forum, May 28: Newton (Sir Isaac). Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica…editio ultima, auctior et emendatior, Amsterdam, Sumptibus Societatis, 1714. £8,000-12,000
Forum, May 28: Kepler (Johannes). Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, wuibus astronomiae pars optica traditur, first edition, Frankfurt am Main, 1604. £5,000-7,000
Forum Auctions Fine Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper 28th May 2026
Forum, May 28: Tagliacozzi (Gaspare). De Curtorum Chirurgia per insitionem, libri duo, first edition, Venice, Gasparo Bindoni, 1597. £7,000-10,000
Forum, May 28: Lootsman (Jacobsz). The Lightning Colomne, or Sea-Mirrour, containing the Sea-Coasts of the Northern, Eastern and Western Navigation..., 1670. £8,000-12,000
Forum, May 28: Ribelles y Helip (José), Attributed to. An album comprising 33 finely executed watercolours of Spanish costume, bull-fighting scenes, and other genre subjects, [circa 1830]. £10,000-15,000
