Fragment 134

To what extent are our responses to a book –the meanings we read out of it, the taste it leaves in our mouths, the impression it makes on us, our love or indifference to it-, to what extent is all this determined –even if only subliminally- by the size and style of the type used, the quality of the paper under our fingers, its smell, the proportions of its shape, its weight in the hand, the stiffness of its cover, the book as object? Madame Bovary is clearer funnier wittier and more sarcastically intelligent when I divorce the text from the medium on which I have read it.