For over a year and a half, I’ve been tracking various encounters with books here at the Descant blog. I’ve been writing about the curious intersections between reading and ordinary life, our relationships towards books as objects, and the impact books have upon us far beyond the reading experience. I’ve written about books in the bath, books in transit, bibliokleptomania, books as fashion, unfinished, on docks with a beer in the summertime, and accidentally bookish vacations. The point of all of this being that books happen to us, whether we stumble upon them on the sidewalk or they’re delivered in the post. Whether we choose them carefully (so we think), or whether they choose us. Books in remainders bins, free books boxed on the sidewalk, our old books with adolescent marginalia, those never returned to the library (mistakenly, or otherwise). All the best books we ever encounter come with stories beyond the text.

On Sunday, I encountered Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar crawling out of a pylon at the corner of Bloor Street and Avenue Road. How curious and even curiouser. And quite fitting, really– that this was a bookish encounter with children’s literature, and not even with an actually book. Which might be the way that most of my bookish encounters go during the next while, when I’ve got a brand new baby to get to know, and get to grow.

I imagine that the baby will bring me encounters with books entirely unlike those I’ve experienced before. Books with pictures, for example, or made of cloth, or books that are made to be drowned in the bath and float back up to the surface. Our baby even has books without words, and mirrors instead for Baby to gaze at itself (which is probably a metaphor for some awful adult literature, though I’m not entirely sure just what specifically). The baby will get to know books as objects before becoming aware of any other use value for them– books, like the whole world, are to be seen, touched, tasted, smelled, and perhaps even ripped to pieces. And yes, books are also to be heard, as eventually Baby might become interested in being read a story.

There are many wonderful ways to encounter children’s books here in Toronto.
I look forward to story time at our local library, and small baby as excuse to peruse to the children’s literature shelves. We live within walking distance of the Lillian H. Smith library and the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books. Just a trip on the streetcar will take us to The Children’s Book Bank, which is a marvelous place where books are precious and many, and can be had for free. (Also a very good place to take your lovingly-used books when the shelves become too crowded). Our closest playground is the Margaret Fairley Parkette (which is pretty literary, as parkettes go). We’ve got great bookshops on all sides of us, whose children’s sections are well worth exploring. And when Baby gets a little bit bigger, we’ll take in TINARS for Tots.

So the bookish encounters will continue, just perhaps at a more toddling pace.