How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
There's a boundary line: on one side are those who make books, on the other those who read them. I want to remain one of those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading ends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want […] that's why I refuse to set foot inside a publishing house, even for a few minutes. (9.30)
After you and Ludmilla decide that a visit to the publisher is in order, Ludmilla refuses to go with you. When you push her on this, she insists that she doesn't want to get involved with the production side of books. She has an innocence in her that she's trying to protect. In other words, she doesn't want to know the magician's secrets; she just wants to keep thinking of books as things that come to her as fully finished, magical objects.
Quote #5
"I've been working for years and years for this publisher ... so many books pass through my hands... but can I say that I read? This isn't what I call reading.... In my village there were few books, but I used to read, yes, in those days I did read.... I keep thinking that when I retire I'll go back to my village and take up reading again, as before. Every now and then I set a book aside, I'll read this when I retire, I tell myself, but then I think that it won't be the same thing any more...." (9.44)
Mr. Cavedagna, the man from the printing house, entertains the hope that when he retires, he'll be able to return to the reading practice of his boyhood days, when he'd steal away into his family's chicken coop and read (maybe minus the awful smell). He wants to return to a point of innocence the same way that the speaker in the first novel, "If on a winter's night a traveler," wishes he could turn back time to a new beginning. Cavedagna is reasonably fearful that he won't be able to go back, though, since it's not easy to unlearn something you already know.
Quote #6
[I]n this [publishing] office books are considered raw material, spare parts, gears to be dismantled and reassembled. Now you understand Ludmilla's refusal to come with you; you are gripped by the fear of having also passed over to 'the other side' and of having lost that privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definitive, to which there is nothing to be added, from which there is nothing to be removed. But you are consoled by the faith Cavedagna continues to cherish in the possibility of innocent reading, even here. (11.1)
As a reader, you're depressed by your visit to the printing house. You can no longer think of a book as something you can open, enjoy, then be done with. You can no longer entertain the idea that you've fully "understood" a book once you've read it. When you see books taken apart and put back together in a printer's shop, you realize that words and stories can fly off in different directions. And you also know that Ermes Marana has filled everything you read with uncertainty. Can Ludmilla give you a big "I told you so"?