In praise of Large Print books: "Seeing is Believing"

Wichita, 1962. I read Tom Swift and Hardy Boys books in bed with my Boy Scout flashlight. It was after the parents’ call for “lights out” and a brighter light might have awakened my brother who would want to talk about trains. He spent many hours with his model trains, vowing that one day he would pilot locomotives across the prairie. Instead, he learned the air traffic controller trade in the USAF and spent his career assisting pilots through the crowded skies.

I am about to turn 75 and I need more than a Boy Scout flashlight to read at night or any other time. Kindle, you might say, with its lit screen and adjustable type. Done and done. I love my Kindle. I’ve read some smashing books on it. Big ones, too. In 2022, I read “The Dark Forest” by Cixun Liu, the second book in the “Three-Body Problem” series. A long one at 528 pages. It was a slog sometimes, but the highs outnumbered the lows. Made me watch the first part of the Netflix series and make sense of it. Part Two coming up! 

I always miss holding an actual book. Something magical about sliding a book from a library shelf and opening it to that first page. The feel of it, the smell, the look. Lately I’ve been exploring the Large Print section at the Ormond Beach Public Library. It features lobby racks of new LP books in a section dedicated to donors. In the stacks, the library features aisle after aisle of LP books and CD books for the audible (and Audible) oriented. LP can stand for large print and also LP as in Long-Playing records. LP, record, or album – all terms we used for our 1970s purchases from Peaches. We played those Zeppelin disks long and often and appreciated their albums of songs which live in our bones. We annoyed our children by singing them badly and loudly on car trips. For them, LP might mean Loud Pops.

During my many decades at libraries, I paid little attention to the Large Print sections. They’ve grown as Americans age, especially our large cohort of Baby Boomers. Us. Me.

In the Ormond Beach Public Library’s “Miscellaneous Large Print” section, I saw a red trade paperback that outshone the others and plucked it out. It was “These Precious Days,” a collection of essays by Ann Patchett. I recently read (on Kindle) my first Patchett novel, “The Dutch House” and loved it. Beautiful writing, compelling characters, and a story I wasn’t sure about sometimes. But by the end, I was impressed with the tale of the Conroy family and their creaky old house outside Philadelphia. The writer made me pay attention to the characters as the story unwound and that takes skill. I will read more.

I just did. I checked out Patchett’s essays and read them. With an essay collection, the reader can pick and choose.  “A Talk to the Association of Graduate School Deans in the Humanities” was not my first choice. A bit dry, perhaps, nothing like “The Paris Tattoo” or “Eudora Welty: An Introduction,” Welty one of my favorite writers.

When I got to it, her talk to the humanities deans grabbed me. She wrote about her days as a grad student at the Iowa Writers Workshop. It was around the same time I went to the grad school MFA program at Colorado State University in the last half of the 1980s. There was a generational difference (she 22, me 37) and a gender one. But our experiences were similar in several ways. She had some great teachers and mentors but also some not-so-good ones. She scrambled to make ends meet and so did I. Her fellow students could be annoying but you put a bunch of creatives in cramped quarters and you get conflict. She sums it up: “My MFA showed me the importance of community.” That was my reason to do it and I did find community.

Patchett’s essays are marvelous, as marvelous as her novels (see my comments on “The Dutch House”). I was impressed by the cover art, a painting of the author’s dog Sparky by artist Sooki Raphael. The title essay is about Patchett’s friendship with the artist. It’s long, as essays go (88 pages), but it’s the heart of the book. Feel free to cry.

I was pleased to see that Patchett’s essay collection was issued by Harper Large Print, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Harper Large Print had a farewell message for me and other LP readers:

“Light and easy to read, Harper Large Print paperbacks are for the book lovers who want to see what they are reading without strain. For a full listing of titles and new releases to come, please visit our website: www.hc.com.”

This final thought in all caps: “SEEING IS BELIEVING!”