More intrigue! More postcards!

Alexandria
by Nick Bantock
Book 2 of the Morning Star Trilogy, sequel to the Griffin & Sabine trilogy
San Francisco : Chronicle Books, 2002
ISBN: 081183140X

I finished up the second book to the Morning Star trilogy, Bantock's continuation of his Griffin & Sabine story. I wrote about the first trilogy here.
The story continues to keep me guessing, keep me enraptured with these fabulously mystical people and places. And the artwork is just as breathtaking as the first one. I am very sad the the third book is on it's way and this journey will be over. I don't want to wait longer, though, because I want the story to remain fresh in my brain.
I keep going back to the way in which Bantock is telling the story, using the postcards and letters. It makes each page so fun - looking over the beautiful artwork on the postcards and envelopes. Does anyone still send postcards that are more than "Having fun in Florida!" using a fifty cent mass-produced card they bought a tourist store? Or put time and effort in to creating handwritten letters and hand-decorated envelopes? I love ephemera so much and collect vintage and antique post cards. I prefer ones that have been sent over the blank ones. They give dates, provenance, and illuminate a moment in two people's lives. Today we sent emails with e-cards for holidays instead of postcards and letters. I feel nostalgic for times I never saw.
It makes me want to send postcards and letters to people, but also to make them beautiful like the ones I collect or the ones Bantock creates for his books. Sadly I have no artistic abilities at all. I have tried, and failed. They come out looking like a 6yr old got herself into the colored pencils, markers, stickers, etc. Cheesy is a good word for it,infantile as well. Crap and "My eyes, they bleed!" work, too.
I have tried all my life to create beautiful things. I've tried drawing, painting, writing, photography. I am successful at failure, though, and I think I do so beautifully. That's something, right?
Last night while reading one of the letters that you full out of the envelopes, I had that wicked feeling of spying come over me. We, the readers, are looking in to these characters' lives from the outside, reading private thoughts and words. Mayby that is part of what makes the postcard so interesting, though. Private thoughts aren't kept private. The other day someone had one on Post Secret that was about wanting to amuse the postman with his/her Post Secret cards. But the letters definitely give that feeling of voyeurism. Here are words spoken written between lovers, secret information about the mystery not to be found by the mysterious and possible evil Frolotti. Here is life being lived, explained on paper, read by strangers. It almost makes the characters, despite the magic and mysticism, seem more real than in others novels. There are no passages detailing their appearance down to the freckles of their face, Gogolian jaunts into their pasts. And yet I think that I know them more than if even Dickens had sat down to write their tale. Their own words speak to so much.
Collecting things like postcards makes me feel like I am sharing in these people's lives. I am not a part of it, and not quite the voyeur since much of what has occurred did so fifty plus years ago. I am sharing because of the tactile action of holding the card in my hands. I had that feeling, too, last night with Alexandria and reminded myself that the letters had not actually been sent by these people. But all of the books I have read have been borrowed. Though I think that some day I will own the two trilogies, at the moment I get all of them by Interlibrary Loan from the library. They come from public libraries and universities. I don't know if I am the first person to read these, but I feel like there is something special about all us strangers gently taking the stiff folded paper out of the envelope, reading it through, and gently re-folding it and putting it back. I have yet to encounter and of these pages ripped or dirtied in any way. Perhaps in a few years I will seek library copies again, seeing if time changes their condition. There is a library subject classification for books with movable or removable parts. They have decided that these books are special. I think they are because they demand an interaction with the reader, but I think librarians may just view it as "things that can and will get lost."

So writing to someone is sharing, communicating, connecting to them. The book, especially when not privately owned but library borrowed, holds its own form of connecting people. Even when it is owned by one person, it holds that special potential because it may be later sold to a used bookstore, given away, lent to friends, sold at a yard or estate sale. These items live lives beyond our creating, using, and owning them. I love old books, not only because they have pretty leather bindings and such, but because they hold history in their pages, they hold lives. I love it when I find one that years ago was notated in the margins. It's this meta conversation between myself and that distant reader. Sharing with a stranger.