fourzoas | BTT: Conditioning (Reply)

This week's question has to do with how physical you get with books:

Are you a spine breaker? Or a dog-earer? Do you expect to keep your books in pristine condition even after you have read them? Does watching other readers bend the cover all the way round make you flinch or squeal in pain?

I'm seated before a variety of books--there's shelving space in my office credenza, and I've filled the shelves with the materials I'm using this semester. Evidence of my reading is everywhere, but it changes depending on the book's relationship to me.

If I own the book and it's a consumable one (meaning it's a book I'm teaching from/writing about): it's toast. The spine is broken, pages may be threatening to abandon their moorings, and the covers are heading for the hills. Brightly colored post-it notes and flags protrude from all available edges. The interior of the book is underlined with pen, pencil, marker--whatever was available, but generally never fountain pen, since the paper is usually so cheap that the ink would feather and bleed--and some, but not many, pages are dog-eared. Interior cover pages may hold notes that wouldn't wait for an available notepad, and some few books may be supplemented by obliging index cards with cryptic short phrases that point to some weird notion or connection I made while reading. I love my books till they're real.

If I own the book and it's not consumable: it looks nearly new. A page or two may hold the mark of a dog-eared tag, but the book is generally as it was when I bought it. I don't know why that is exactly.

If it's borrowed (library or otherwise): it looks as it did when I got it, but while I'm reading it's a post-it paradise. I really hate getting a book from the library that's filled with someone's markings. Ruins it for me because now I have to navigate some random reader's head in addition to the author's. Rude, if you ask me.

Well, that was oddly cathartic. How about you?