I love the physical object of the book too. But the idea that books should remain pristine is, in essence, anti-reading. A pristine book is an unloved book: well-loved books should wear their love on their sleeves.
Besides, margin annotations have a long and illustrious history. Think of Fermat: “I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem which this margin is too small to contain”
&@jerwin
obligitory
If it’s a prolific author I put a dot inside the dust cover or on the last page of a paperback.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t object to thoughtful comments by a bloody genius.
On a more serious note: I don’t think that a book needs to be kept in pristine condition. But I do think that books ought to be kept in good condition for future readers, and that books should not be destroyed.
A pen marking on page seven doesn’t bother me. Someone ripping out pages needs some explanation about the cultural importance of books.
Pretty much that, yeah. They generally go something something kill the English bastards, something something the clans are at war, something something horses.
Ursula Vernon did a great amount of research into the field a few months ago on an episode of KUEC.
Maybe some kind of “I’m feeling lucky” button where you can specify a genre and a librarian will deliver a selection of books you haven’t read before.
I wonder if this is mostly limited to romance or if it also happens in mystery and westerns as well.
My guess is that her nemesis is the one marking up page 7. This person is hoping the librarian will erase the markings, so as to mess with her nemesis’s head.
I check entropy in regular intervals just to be on the safe side. You never know.
Why stop there? Why not put covers of books by, say Barbara Cartland, on books by Chuck Tingle and slip them on the shelves?
I’m usually pretty bitter about marks in library books but these are unobtrusive so it’s kind of just charmingly mysterious and clever. I can respect this.
When I was younger (back in the 80s/early 90s) my local library (in Australia) used to have printed sheets of paper they stuck in the back of library books. It had a grid with each cell about 1 inch x 1 inch in size and it was about 5 cells across by 15 cells down. It was there so you could leave a “mark” which was anything really, a smiley, a letter, word, symbol etc so that you could see if you had read a book before. When it was full they would just stick another on top (it was just stuck at the top of the sheet, like a post-it note). It was always fun to look and see if you recognised any marks from other books to see if someone was reading all the same books as you.
A single Fforde reference and my heart leaps!
“The question I have is: If the books are that hard to tell apart, how much does it matter if you re-read some?”
I enjoy forgetting what I read…once I read trough my library of hard Sci-Fi I can start and enjoy again from the beginning.
I’ll try to include some more, then. (Any thread about cheese, lately?)
7
Gah, now I need eyebleach! I watch too much ST:TNG to have this image burned into my brain…
…I guess a rewatch of The Guild is out, too.
My duty here is done.
Watch out for library books with this stamp in them:
Wesley and his mother?
I knew he reminded me of someone but I couldn’t say of whom.
Oh dear.
People say some cruel things about perfect binding, but it seems to work pretty well on paperback novels. And O’Reilly paperbacks hold up well even when you open them flat all day long (they use burst binding, not stitching). What always fall apart are those full-color craft and recipe books which do have stitched signatures, but then the (glossy, excessively heavy) signatures are glued directly to the cover, so that they plop on the floor the first time you open the book. It’s an abomination.
