If you were asked to list the most dangerous occupations in the world, your list would probably include: police work, being a soldier or fireman or spy or pilot, or even being a stuntman. What you probably would not include, however, is being a confirmed bibliophile. After all, reading lots of books is essentially a relaxing and non-violent activity.
Bibliophiles go further than reading lots of books and the transition from one to the other often goes unremarked. There are, however, three warning signs. The first is when a person starts to re-read their favourite books five or six times. At this point the condition is not serious and can be reversed by careful therapy.
The second sign occurs when a person begins to put books back in the library half-read because they find all the plots familiar and predictable - resulting in a drastic decrease in the number of books they can bring themselves to read - although they continually long for a story containing some indefinable idea; a 'perfect tale' if you will. By this point only severe treatment and extensive therapy can prevent the final transition to bibliophilia - and even then the process rarely succeeds.
By the third sign there is no hope. The victim begins to write his or her own tales in an effort to create the aforementioned 'perfect tale' - an unattainable ideal. Strangely, bibliophilia rarely affects those voracious readers of non-fiction: perhaps the condition is only triggered by the suspension of reality so often required by fiction.
Bibliophilia usually takes decades to develop, affecting young and old alike. For readers who find it difficult, if not impossible, to read slowly; the onset of bibliophilia occurs much sooner than in slower readers. However, once a person has contracted bibliophilia, they are in a dangerously unstable state of mind. Let me expand on that:
As has often been said, 'knowledge is power.' At the same time, belief is a different sort of power - and for millennia people have believed that the arrangements of shapes that we call words are a means of storing knowledge. Is it then so large a step to the words themselves being a source of power? The general rule is that the larger a book, the more words it will contain and therefore the more power it has: that is, the more power it has over a person who reads those words. Similarly, the better written a book is or the older it is, the more power the words contained in it have. If a book is well written, then the probability of someone reading all the way through it despite a bland plot is high.
In the same way, if a book or a story contained in a book is old, the words have had more time to gather power. Examples of this effect are found in the writings of Shakespeare or Dickens. Society may have made sweeping changes since their stories were first written, but if you read or watch a professional production of 'Macbeth,' the power of the words used is extraordinarily strong. The same happens if you read 'A Tale of Two Cities' or watch 'Oliver Twist.'
That is why language used to change markedly over the aeons. It was a sort of natural defence against the power of those old masterpieces. Now, however, words are changing less and less as the globalization of cultures nears completion. Indeed, if not for the advent of computers, television and film to distract humans from the more powerful stories hidden in books, Bibliophilia would probably be as prevalent as AIDS!
But what, precisely, is bibliophilia? In simple terms, it is the permanent state of a bibliophile.
A bibliophile hunts books. He rarely enters bookshops for fear that if he buys a book it will not last him the day and his money will have been wasted. At first, he haunts the libraries where books are held like dangerous criminals. He stalks through them at every opportunity, pouncing on titles and authors that catch his eye. Often, he only reads the blurb on the back and the prologue or first chapter to get the flavour of the story before returning the book to its shelf and moving on. Of those he selects to look at more fully, he will usually read less than half before becoming dissatisfied and, returning the detritus of the feast within the week, seeking out new prey as he digests the substance of the old.
Eventually the bibliophile takes one of several routes. He may fixate on a select group of authors who fulfil his needs, stalking them and devouring each new tale as it hits print. Or he may develop a craving for wild books; rogue stories not allowed on shelves and not to be found in any collection. They are rare, but they are also the most powerful of tales, having developed a rudimentary sentience and become adept at feeding off unsuspecting bibliophiles.
Occasionally, the less cunning of these stories are captured and placed in libraries or bookstores; when read, they merely prick the reader's imagination, leading him to think of how the tale can be continued past its given ending - so causing the story itself to grow a little. The truly wild books are a type of neurovore, feeding off the imaginations of their victims to such an extent that the readers act out possible continuations to the story and think of nothing else. In the cases of some stories - particularly crime - this can be extremely dangerous.
No one has ever been able to kill a wild book, but it has been theorized that there is a way to partially tame one. To do so, an alert and well-prepared bibliophile with an extremely resilient imagination must read the book all the way through and, within the next few moments, construct a plausible ending for all the characters before immersing himself in a pile of new stories for at least a week to be sure that the tale cannot feed off him. This last must be done to completely cleanse the mind of the bibliophile from thoughts of the rogue story.
At present there have only been two documented attempts to tame a book; Roger de Hame and Sylv Layed - and even now all we know of them is that neither was able to completely subdue their chosen tales. We do not even know the titles of the books they worked with as that is considered classified information. What we do know, is that the results of failure have been drastic. One such result was the period of history known as the Dark Ages. The other was the start of the American Revolution.
There is one other course bibliophiles may take when they are unable to find new stories to titillate their imaginations, and that is to become an author. In doing so, they must write a tale as close as possible to their perfect ideal or the transition from bibliophile to author will be incomplete. That last sentence encompasses the root of the problem these victims face. Too many of them begin story after story; writing enthusiastically for a few days, then, finding another idea more attractive, abandoning their tale for a new one. Those stories that are well-developed but not finished are themselves the seeds of the wild books. Unfinished by human hand, ideas and phrases from books stored nearby are gradually assimilated into the tale until it is ready to pounce on its first unsuspecting bibliophile.
As yet there have been no reports of dead storiesand that leads many scientists to theorize that the wild books are themselves alarval stage in the slow life-cycle of tales. If that is so, then we must beginto wonder what they will develop into as they mature - and how long do storiesactually live? Will whatever is formed from wild books be friendly or hostileto the human race, harmless or deadly? That we do not know; and the unknown isalways feared.
