For sure, books can calm the savage breast…and the savage beast too.

Book lovers, wherever they go, not only wear their hearts on their sleeves, they use the whole t-shirt to proclaim their passions.

At the recent Florida Antiquarian Book Fair in St. Petersburg, men and women, boys and girls strolled the Coliseum, proudly sharing their love of books and reading, their dedication to all things language and literacy.

The Coliseum in St. Petersburg, site of the 37th annual Florida Antiquarian Book Fair

The splendidly festive Coliseum hosts the annual Antiquarian Book Fair, so book dealers and book lovers make their pilgrimage to the mother church, spreading their gospel of the printed word through their clothing.

And yes, the bookish zealots carried plenty of tote bags with classic book covers, even wore socks, ties and scarves featuring retro checkout-cards, lists of banned books, and other literary ephemera. Pilgrims made the rounds of vendors, like visiting stations of the cross on their way to salvation.

OK, enough with the literary metaphors and similes; here’s some of what we saw.

Thomas Jefferson, our third President, knew the value of libraries.

One of our most bookish presidents ever — his personal library became the basis of the Library of Congress — codified the mantra that identifies most of us.

And in a world where sh*t happens on a daily, if not hourly, basis (Creative Loafing Tampa even has a regular column on this crappy reality), it’s a good reminder that Lit also happens, providing a necessary alternative to all that swirling excrement.

Lit happens every day. I’m a serial reader. Like a smoker who lights a fresh cigarette from the butt end of the one he’s finishing, as I come to the end of one book, I start the first few pages of the next.

Isn’t it one of our pet peeves when people egregiously misuse the word “literally”?

Ironically, they say literally when they mean figuratively. How screwed-up is that mix-up?!?

I was literally digging myself a grave when I kept eating all that baklava. Really, a shovel in one hand and fork in the other? I literally blew up when I read that article on Trump. Really, you swallowed a stick of dynamite? He was literally insane with jealousy. Really, you were institutionalized? I literally cannot wrap my head around how many people showed up at the fundraiser! Really, that’s a good thing cause I hate the optic of your head stretched like a rubber band around the charitable crowd.

People, find a better intensifier please. It literally burns me up when I hear it misused.

Like a rolling stone…like a candle in the wind…like a bridge over troubled water…like a prayer…cold as ice…

Metaphor: All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances.

Simile: Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.

There, there, calm down, that’s all you need to know. Grammarians can use Shakespeare and Forrest Gump and pop songs (Bob Dylan, Elton John, Simon and Garfunkel, Madonna, Foreigner) as their guides for such distinctions. There'll be more lessons tomorrow.

How many times do I have to explain this!?!

Surely it’s the sign of a decent education, a marker of linguistic sophistication, that we show we know the difference between there (pointing direction), their (showing possession) and they’re (a contraction for they are). These words are not the same.

Don't let English-as-second-language speakers be the only ones who know these distinctions. It's time for native English speakers to know their own language too.

As for Thurr, that’s the way we say all three in the South.

We could also talk about its (possession), it’s (contraction for it is or it has) and its’ (wrong, wrong, wrong, used by the confused. Never. Correct. Ever.).

But we will let that rest for now. It's time to move on to another grammatical bugbear (legendary creature historically used in some cultures to frighten children).

And that hobgoblin is the ancient spelling mnemonic (sorry about that silent initial m) about "i before e except after c". In fact, this nostrum is pretty much a big fat lie because of numerous exceptions. Sure, it works much of the time, as there are roughly three times as many ie sequences than ei sequences — mischief, niece, grief, chief — but there are plenty of words where the rule breaks down. For every ceiling, there's a concierge, a conscience and some celibacies. For every deceit, there are deficiencies, delicacies, and dicier.

The iciest glaciers make idiocies out of the conceit of "except after c." Weird how that works.

I want to teach the world a grammar lesson.

In a world where women seem to dominate the book clubs and men are afraid to be seen with a copy of Jane Austen in their grubby paws, it’s good to know real men still read. With an anti-intellectual culture like ours, where men are expected to focus on business and sports and video games, some men still say it loud and say it proud: they read books.

We often see male political candidates at a NASCAR event or at a rodeo or football game or hunting lodge. All manly pursuits for sure. Never at the opera or ballet or library. So I’m waiting for the male politician who proudly proclaims the values of the public library and the bookstore, the intrinsic value of the book. Obama did. Just sayin'.

Real men read books, even when they buy cheap, ill-fitting t-shirts.

This politician in my fantasy will let the reporter record his reading of Proust as he looks directly into the camera’s eye, testosterone dripping from his sensitive full lips, and proclaim with Marcel, “Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.” If so, he has my vote.

A charming illustration from Edward Gorey where the old man reads to the young boy, transmitting a masculine endeavor to the next generation.

Big or small, fat or thin, paperback or hardback, printed or audio, analogue or digital, fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose, old or new, we like them all.

If MC Hammer can rap about liking big butts, then there's no reason why we can't sing about liking big books.

MC Hammer, eat your heart out. Credit: Ben Wiley

I like big butts and I can not lie. You other brothers can't deny that when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a round thing in your face you get sprung … Ooh, rump of smooth skin You say you wanna get in my benz. Well use me use me cuz [sic] you ain't that average groupy [sic]. And so forth.

Yeah, baby, big books give us a sprung in our benz too.

After a full day of book-browsing and literature-leeching, you can be addled by a ballroom filled with books and bookish paraphernalia.

If so many books, so little time is always the canker that gnaws the rose of our reading sensibilities — our clock always ticking, and our calendar always flipping its pages like some mid-40s movie shot with calendar pages whipping off and whirling away — our mind, like Lear's, can be beset by storms.

It can even cause you to mix your metaphors in a mashup of leeches, canker, rose, clock, calendar, movies, Shakespeare and threatening weather.

As for books, “t’is true: there’s magic in the web of it.”

Really, a vendor who sells just bookends? I'll take two from Shelf A, two from Shelf B, and two from Shelf C.

Bookends of marble, brass, wood, ceramic, leather, stone, all to corral and control your increasingly runaway book collection.

Let's end our pilgrimage here.

We are readers.

We are writers.

We are lovers.

Ben Wiley, a Creative Loafing film reviewer, also advocates for paper and print. Dead trees, if you will. He volunteers at a local library bookstore and enjoys engaging with readers and their books. This BookStories feature highlights some of these Ben, Book & Beyond encounters. Contact him here.