Ben Schott has a brief piece at the NYT about his love for, and therefore justified abuse of, books. I don't quite know how to take this, but I'm pretty sure I don't like it. His premise is that it is not the book cover and the pages that are significant, but the contents that matter. On this (shaky?) foundation, he feels it's perfectly acceptable to abuse the books he's reading while he's reading them. By "abuse" he mentions smallish things, like marginalia, page folding and then moves on to(gasp!) spine-bending & whole book folding. He does a cute bit about how books stand up vs. websites:
"Indeed, the ability of books to survive abuse is one of the reasons they are such remarkable objects, elevated far beyond, say, Web sites. One cannot borrow a Web site from a friend and not return it for years. One cannot, yet, fold a Web site into one’s back pocket, nor drop a Web site into the bath. One cannot write comments, corrections or shopping lists on Web sites only to rediscover them (indecipherable) years later. One cannot besmear a Web site with suntan-lotioned fingers, nor lodge sand between its pages. One cannot secure a wobbly table with a slim Web site, nor use one to crush an unsuspecting mosquito. And, one cannot hurl a Web site against a wall in outrage, horror or ennui."
While he also makes an on-point mention about libraries who love to hate marginalia in their own books and yet are equally awed when they find marginalia in an important book, it is this seemingly innocent mention of air travel that had me cringing:
"The businessman who tears off and discards the chunk of John Grisham he has already read before boarding a plane may lack finesse, but he is not a Nazi."
Nazi? No. But. Do people really tear off whole sections of a book? Even if it is, ahem, Grisham? I might need to seek therapy for this. I love my books - everything about them. From the cover to the smell (don't you love the smell of the pages? the ink?) to the words contained within. I do not write in them. I do not highlight in them. I don't go so far as to barely crack them open while reading to retain the strength of the spine, but I do mind the spine. I be sure to support weak ones so as not to incur further damage. And while I do enjoy stumbling across marginalia in a used book recently acquired, I'm not interested in leaving doodles in my own margins for future generations to puzzle over.
In short (or long as it seems on the 6th paragraph of what was meant to be a much shorter post), I take excellent care of my books even though the contents are, I think we can all agree, what really matter. What about you? What is your accepted level of "book-abuse" and what is simply too cruel?
