A Plea to Readers

[rapa]

I saw this today and it reminded me of the little lending library that I set up on our front porch when I was in elementary school. All went well until Mother realized the stacks were mainly my brother's books!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/stop-ruining-books_55f9a7eee4b0...

[Mandy Muffin]

I get books from the library in various states of misuse: dog ears, food stains, pen markings, damage to the spine, etc. I have always been taught to use a bookmark in a library book and not make any marks or stains in it."  I sometimes get my scotch tape out and repair a book with damage or use an eraser on markings.  I once borrowed a book and some prior reader had marked over all the dirty words in pen.  Lucky for me I knew what most of them where.    

I think the worst abuse of a book I ever ran across was done by a passenger on a flight who sat next to me.  He had just purchased a best seller, hardback book.  He cracked it open, totally destroying the spine, then began ripping out a few pages at a time, which he read then stuffed into the seat back container.  I looked in horror and he explained, "Hey, I bought the book, so I can do what I want with it.  I find it easier to read a few pages at a time in hand than fumbling with the damn thing.  And the advantage is that the book gets lighter as I read through it.  Plus I have no interest in recycling it." 

"But nobody else is going to be able to read it after your through with it," I observed.

"That not my problem," he said, ripping out 5 or 6 pages to read. 

[rapa]

That would have totally blown my cool!!!!!!!

[Ursula]

Great article!!  Thanks for sharing.  I have 2 comments:  First, when I first adopted/rescued my dog Zoey, she rewarded me by chewing the cover off the brand new library book I was reading.  Certainly not something I anticipated happening; none of my other dogs had ever tried to eat a book!!  I became a celebrity at my local library and made plans to replace the book without complaining about the fee to get it bar-coded and back in the system.  The celebrity part was when Zoey did it a second time.  That's when I discovered everyone on staff knew about me and my Zoey.  I've had Zoey for 8 years now and fortunately she's lost her taste for books.

Second, the article talked about the pros and cons of marginalia.  A friend once loaned me a book with so many notes that it destroyed the possibility of reading the story.  I guess I'm saying there's a time and a place, but if you want to rewrite the story, use a notebook, not the margins.

[Lip Service]

I find that mutilating a book very disturbing and consider that writing in margins is a form of disfiguring a book.

A friend who had a very large library had to destroy it all in order to digitize it. He bought a high end scanner, he would crack the spine of the book (there is a special tool to do that) and feed the stack of pages into the scanner and turn them into a digital format then dispose of the original book. Part of the reason he did this is that most of that library was scientific works that he used frequently but he would need to spend hours looking through it for a specific reference or quote. Having them in a digital form allowed him to search into this large library in a few seconds. Another benefit came later when he had to go overseas and was able to take all this library with him in his briefcase on a hard disc.