How intolerable life would be without books and bookshops

Now the literary festival season is in full swing, we should recognise that the real worth of dusty tomes is sensual, not financial

I love a beautiful book, but its market price is what interests me least. The monetary importance of a first as against a second edition leaves me cold.Yet I'd claim to be a raving bibliomane. In literature, politics, science and art, the most valuable things I have acquired in 50 years of being alive include my books. I've got a few paintings. There are, now I think about it, a scatter of warm-blooded human beings - relatives, that sort of thing, a friend or two - to whom I owe some kind of allegiance. But the books, racked, stacked, ordered, disordered - are at the heart of being me.

What makes a valuable book? Let's assume to begin with that the book must be well written or, at the minimum, usefully informative. Let's take that as read. The next essential is that it must be legible. I've inherited a beautifully bound Edwardian set of Ruskin, in light blue leather and gold covers, which I never open and don't very much care for because the print is too small and dense.

This rules out quite a lot of paperbacks, particularly as they age. Cheap paperbacks can still be little caskets of value in a different way if they represent the first time one came across, say, Turgenev or Hesse as a teenager. They become memory aides. I'd give up every school photo, every report card, every letter for the crumble-spined, faded paperbacks that set me on fire at school.

The principles of sturdiness, legibility and a cracking read apply to earlier books too. I recently finished a three-part film project for the BBC about the history of Darwinism and at the party we had to celebrate, I was presented by the wonderful team with a John Murray three-volume edition of Darwin's Life and Letters, from 1888. I have no idea of how valuable they are and I don't want to know, because I want to be able to carry them with me on to the tube or into pubs and carry on reading.

Does all of this sound too utilitarian? If so, I've failed because the sensual and aesthetic sense is an essential part of a valuable book. Ugly books abound - shiny paper, crass typography, poor illustrations. A great book has excellent words, important thoughts and perhaps beautiful pictures, but it must also feel right to the fingers, smell good and sit snug in the palm of your hand.

It's a piece of technology and one of the finest mankind has come up with, but "fit for purpose" means helping the reader - and we are all sensual beings. Books exist to transmit ideas, as bread is for eating; but darkly lustrous ink and downy-white paper make life worth living as surely as poppy seed and butter.

Modernity has brought great comforts and freedoms, but it brutishly smashes down, too. The internet (and this recession) is destroying fine old local papers. Higher booze prices and the smoking ban are destroying pubs. Similarly, we all know how hard the world of Amazon and Google has hit the small bookshop. Life without papers and pubs is an intolerable prospect. Would there be any point in leaving home at all if bookshops went too?

I've spent more hours than I care to admit searching them out, inhaling their aroma and leaving with bundles of new friends under my arm. Let's hope this is a pleasure still available to children and grandchildren. Books don't need to be plugged in. One day, the best of today's will be antiquarian and treasured. And that's as it should be, for here is the original and ultimate democratic technology. Books have specific values and a very sophisticated market place. But a good book's worth a lot more than money.

This is an abridged version of an essay written to mark the opening next week of the Antiquarian Book Fair
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/may/24/andrew-marr-literary-festival-season
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