Fear of Flying With Books

This winter I traveled to Chile, a fantastically varied country I hope to have a chance to visit again. When I do, I will — like all law-abiding visitors — submit myself to the regulations of Chilean customs.

If you’re an American, and your travel needs are mainly domestic, you will be familiar with our own airline check-in system, with its minatory list of things you cannot bring with you, things that range from the perfectly obvious and specific, like firearms or explosives, to — and I do like this — “anything that might be used as a weapon.”

It is irresistible to imagine a mischief being perpetrated, accidentally or with malice, with a book. Books are not written to be weapons. Well, most aren’t. But many could be: a copy of Clarissa or The Man Without Qualities or, for that matter, anything in hardcover ever published for a lawyer.

I was unprepared, however, for the finesse with which Chilean customs specifies those things that may not be transported in one’s baggage.

One may, the customs instructions inform us, carry “books and brochures issued in paperback and in simple binding [en rústica y en encuadernación común] as well as newspapers, magazines, and printed musical compositions except those printed in luxury editions.” Italics, as we say in academe, mine.

So I’m mentally running through the contents of my baggage, and uncannily the three books I’m carrying are paperbacks. Two Dickensian obesities — The Pickwick Papers (heaven) and Barnaby Rudge (somewhat warmer), and a slim paperback of Borges’s Historia universal de la infamia (Universal History of Infamy), newly acquired in Buenos Aires at the spectacular El Ateneo Grand Splendid bookstore.

El Ateneo, by the way, is a legend. First a theater, the building is now a bookstore. Possibly the most spectacular bookstore in the world, a dream palace in which books are arrayed where seats once were — on the orchestra level and the rings — while the curtained stage is an unpretentious bookstore café. I bought one book as an homage to the Argentinian master.

Borges, the sightless mage of Latin American libraries real and imaginary, would have had something to say about the implicit danger, or value, of the books not to be included in my luggage. If I read the customs forms correctly, I’m not to carry hardback books, and, once those are eliminated, I’m to declare luxury editions of paperbacks or — my favorite detail — those luxury editions of printed musical scores.

I guess something like a copy of the Goldberg Variations in a flexible calfskin binding, the pages edged with gold. Or a paperback score of Mamma Mia!, signed and numbered, and personally inscribed by the members of ABBA, which would, I suppose, make it a luxury edition.

Cut to a Borgesian tale of a man who reads only luxury editions of paperback books and is an avid collector of printed music in, naturally, luxurious versions. The man would never leave home without his reading matter, and so would never be able to fly from Buenos Aires to Santiago, a flight of which he spends his life dreaming.

There were other things I couldn’t bring into Chile, but none of the things that trouble the TSA at American airports, at least based on what the forms say.

Was I carrying propolis? (I had never heard of propolis, which is not part of an ancient Greek temple but something bees make to seal their hives.)

Was I transporting semen or embryos? How about paws? Was I transporting paws? (All good on that score.)

How about “animal products and food for personal use containing them”? Like a cheese sandwich? No, but I was once on a plane when a passenger tried to bring on what looked like a haunch of beef. Readers of Lingua Franca may recall the episode of I Love Lucy in which our heroine smuggles a large cheese onto a plane, wrapping it up as as an infant, in order to avoid a customs declaration, and then, when she discovers midair that she will be charged a fee for bringing the “baby” on board, proceeds to eat the entire cheese, destroying the evidence and terrifying a fellow passenger.

I didn’t feel at all like Lucy, and wasn’t carrying any contraband on my Chilean flight. I didn’t have to disguise a book as a baby, either.

But I won’t be surprised if, before I can make that actual journey once again, I return to South America in a Borgesian dream.

It will probably be about a traveler apprehended for flying with printed music. In a luxury paperback edition, no less.

Correction (2/7/2018, 9:14 a.m.): This post originally showed a library in Spain, mislabeled as El Ateneo, in Argentina. The photo has been corrected.