Sealed for Your Protection

Shrink-wrapped, used paperback books. It’s a thing. I spotted a rack of them in a Calistoga drugstore.

Among the titles were the usual suspects like Sue Grafton’s “infinite alphabet” series ( Z is for Zomebody Please Kill Me) and the no-doubt scintillating Her Ideal Man. Because they trapped the book inside form-fitting plastic, I couldn’t thumb through it-but I suspect it’s about a man who is ideal and, maybe, Fabio.

This kind of literary sleuthing is what an English degree is for-I bet. Whether or not a melted, transparent film appreciably increases the resale value of these titles, I cannot say. But if it does, I’m going to insist the Bohemian get the plastic treatment. Will it up the newstand value? Trick question-the Bohemian is free. Besides, you can’t put a price on the freedom of the press, can you? Don’t answer that.

Shrink-wrapping is a lens through which we can perceive something exquisitely on its own tattered terms. If we could shrink-wrap the perfect imperfections of our souls, we’d probably be better for it. And not because we’d all suffocate. Though I have to admit to a Sylvia Plath-like, by-way-of-polyvinyl-chloride-compulsion to stick my head in a shrink-wrap machine.

Perhaps I’d become like those saints whose bodies don’t decompose, the so-called “incorruptibles,” who no matter how green and leathery…