The Care and Feeding of Books

For one reason or another, this didn't post yesterday. Thursday Thirteen will post later today... just as soon as I figure out what I'm writing about.

I'm a hardback fanatic. I wrap my books in mylar dust jacket protectors and scan them into my database. Asking to borrow a book means a lecture on proper book maintenance. Read a book without removing it from it's dust jacket and putting into a protective book cover? Are you a barbarian? Don't even start on writing in books, dog-earring pages, or putting books face down.

I was reminded of myself in my much younger days (pretty much late elementary school through high school). I couldn't actually afford hardbacks, but I was fanatical about keeping books in good working order: no writing in books, no dog-eared pages, no broken or damaged spines. 

These tendencies, in fact, got me into my one and only fight in my childhood. It was the summer after 6th or 7th grade, at camp, and some older kid was playing keep-away with my copy of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion. In the process, the cover got ripped nearly off and I went absolutely nuts. Being the bookishly ineffectual kid that I was, he was more bemused than threatened and had the good grace to refrain from kicking my butt, which he certainly could have done. 

In college, I finally started writing in and marking up books, out of necessity, but I even resisted that through most of my freshman year--instead of underlining passages and writing notes in the margins of my books, I would re-copy entire passages into a notebook, make note of the page number, and there write any notes I needed. 

With books I'm reading for pleasure, I'm still pretty careful about how I treat them, though I haven't gone so far as to insist on hardcover books or wrap them in mylar, nor--when we build our own house--am I likely to spring for a temperature- and humidity- controlled room and bookshelves with glass doors on them. My obsessive care for books has definite limits.

What about you--what sort of reader and care-taker of books are you?

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