Título da exposição de Luis Manuel Gaspar inaugurada hoje na Biblioteca Nacional. Entrada livre até 31 de agosto: «O estilo minucioso de Luis-sem-acento tem como assinatura a tinta-da-china e o aparo fino, tão fino como a sua elegância. Não dá um passo sem sépia. Mas a gama de cor, por exemplo nas citadas bandas desenhadas (publicadas no jornal Viva Voz e na revista Ler) onde o poema corre como arrepio suscitando variações do olhar sobre sítio significante em modo disléxico e não ilustrativo, torna-se personagem. Pela intensidade da paleta generosa e densa, as texturas, a luz, os céus acontecem mais reais que o real. Como na poesia que também pratica, o museu naturalmente de Luis enche de carne e veias o farol assim como dá ao granito a leveza do veludo.»
I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader. Nor do I think the e-reader will ever completely supplant the physical book – even if it does so numerically. Every book feels and looks different in your hands; every Kindle download feels and looks exactly the same (though perhaps the e-reader will one day contain a "smell" function, which you will click to make your electronic Dickens novel suddenly reek of damp paper, fox marks and nicotine).
Books will have to earn their keep – and so will bookshops. Books will have to become more desirable: not luxury goods, but well-designed, attractive, making us want to pick them up, buy them, give them as presents, keep them, think about rereading them, and remember in later years that this was the edition in which we first encountered what lay inside. I have no luddite prejudice against new technology; it's just that books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information. My father's school prizes are nowadays on my shelves, 90 years after he first won them. I'd rather read Goldsmith's poems in this form than online.
Jorge Figueira de Sousa, livreiro da Esperança (Funchal), faleceu esta noite. Na LER de julho/agosto, Sara Figueiredo Costa conta a história de uma herança familiar com mais de um século.
