Goodreads Bookshelf
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.
Through Good Reads I've gotten involved in a Sci Fi / Fantasy book club, and tangential to another conversation, the subject of how we treat books came up. One poster wrote:
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?
I try to take reasonable care of my books, but I'm in no way fanatical
about it. As long as all the pages are firm in the binding, I'm good to
go. I use highlighters on non-fiction books to mark the key points, as
that helps me to retain the knowledge better and makes it easier to refer
to later on when wanting to extract information for blog entries and such.
Crud. I fall into the book barbarian category. Most of the books I get
are in the bag-O-books the family passes around. Mostly paperbacks. I put
my initials on one of the front pages in case it makes it back to me. I
lost my nice bookmark so I dog ear and I have been known to face down if
someone has gotten that much of my attention. I won't do that with library
books or borrowed from friends books, they get the good treatment.
It depends on the book, I think. Some of my books are in pristine
condition, because I prize them highly. I've even been known to buy a
fresh copy, because the copy I've read has been treated so badly by me,
partially, but mostly by people with whom I've shared it. Other books are
second- or third-hand when I buy them, I read them once, and then passed
them on. They aren't deliberately mistreated, but they show the wear and
tear.
I'm a firm believer in the Library. It's rare I feel compelled to own a
book. After all, once I've read it, it just takes up space. My house is
very small and we have enough books already. I also don't like paying for
them. In 99 out of 100 cases, I don't read a book a second time (at this
stage of the game, I'm lucky to have read a book once!), so to me, it's a
waste to pay for them. There's also something about the library I just
love.
It depends on the book. Hardbacks are treasured posessions that are never
loaned out. However, I do take off the jackets for display on the
bookshelf.