Never Do That to a Book



Do you save your place in a book by setting it face down, or by inserting a bookmark? The difference between the two says something about how you regard and use books. Anne Fadiman labels those two approaches as "courtly love," as in those who respect the physical aspects of a book as well as the contents and would never cause their literature any harm, and "carnal love," meaning those who value the contents way more than the paper its printed on. People who feel carnal love toward books will fold a page down, allow the spine to crack, jot notes down in the margins, or even split a book in half in order to make the act of reading more efficient and enjoyable. Fadiman's brother explains why he leaves open books face down.   

“They are ready in an instant to let me pick them up,” he explains. “To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you’ve only pressed Pause.” I confess to marking my place promiscuously, sometimes splaying, sometimes committing the even more grievous sin of dog-earing the page. (Here I manage to be simultaneously abusive and compulsive: I turn down the upper corner for page-marking and the lower corner to identify passages I want to xerox for my commonplace book.)

All courtly lovers press Stop. My Aunt Carol—who will probably claim she’s no relation once she finds out how I treat my books—places reproductions of Audubon paintings horizontally to mark the exact paragraph where she left off. If the colored side is up, she was reading the left­hand page; if it’s down, the right-hand page. A college classmate of mine, a lawyer, uses his business cards, spurning his wife’s silver Tiffany bookmarks because they are a few microns too thick and might leave vestigial stigmata. Another classmate, an art historian, favors Paris Métro tickets or “those inkjet-printed credit card receipts—but only in books of art criticism whose pretentiousness I wish to desecrate with something really crass and financial. I would never use those in fiction or poetry, which really are sacred.”

Both types of readers love books, but differ in that one regards books as sacred objects to be cherished as well as read, while the other regards the paper manifestation as something to be used, even used up, to get all the good out of it. Read more about this dichotomy at Slate, and then tell us what you think in the following poll. Calling John Farrier! -via Digg

Which type of book lover are you?





Comments (7)

When I was in third grade I had to do a report on a country and include a map. I never had a problem writing, but writing about a specific real thing has never been my forte. I did nothing on the project until the night before it was due, then panicked. My mother said, "What country?" I said, "/I/ don't know." She opened a box of old books --there were always boxes because we were always moving-- she pulled out a book about Asia, opened it, said, "How about Burma?", tore out a few brightly-colored maps and said, "There." I said, "You-- you can't-- That's-- You tore a /book/! [sputter, so on]." She said, "It's /our/ book. We can do what we want with it," in the same tone of voice as when I was horrified about going up into the choir loft to sit with the choir because all the pews were full in church and she pulled me by the hand and said for everyone to hear, "We're just as good as they are and we'll sit where we please." And in ten minutes I'd pasted the maps to big sheets of brown paper and made up a bunch of nonsense about Burma around them. Done. And later when the teacher said, "You were supposed to draw the map yourself," I said, "Oh. But did you ever say that? You just said it had to have a map," and I pointed and said, "Map." And she said, "I want to talk to your mother." Fine. My mother ate teachers and officials for breakfast, as did my grandmother, who two years before that had got a judge fired for sting-closing her restaurant because of a bogus liquor license offense. (A detective had sent his date, a slightly under-age girl, to pick up their drinks.)
If it's a magazine or a newspaper I tear out what I want or take a picture of it. With a borrowed book I'm careful how I even hold it; I say the page number aloud and shut the book and so just remember the number. If it's my book and it's complicated, with a lot of stories or places I want to remember later, to use on the radio, or if it's a play script, I scribble notes all over it in pen and tear the corners of pages and twist them sticking out in special directions to indicate the use order. And I enjoy defiling it, and enjoy seeing it later and remembering all the fun work. It was a book but it's also art now, and personal history.
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There's a book that I'm rereading, Mentally Incontinent by Joe Peacock, that was visibly...distorted, due to water damage following a ruptured hot water heater. But I decided to keep it, and have re-read it a couple times since. I have no hesitation to folding corners, writing in it, etc, and at some point I will simply throw it away. I say people should treat books like they own the book, meaning however the hell they want to, just like their cars. Well-worn books are a sign of love. Comic books, however, should just never be read, immediately sealed in an airtight container, and forgotten about until its time to sell your collection, which is too difficult to do properly, so left in a dark box, forever.
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