.Question from Booking Through Thursday:
Are you a spine breaker? Or a dog-earer? Do you expect to keep your books in pristine condition even after you have read them? Does watching other readers bend the cover all the way round make you flinch or squeal in pain?
I try to treat my books nice. Especially because those I add to my collection are ones I want to read again someday. I don\’t expect that they\’ll always stay pristine, and seeing battered books at the public library actually pleases me: that shows they\’ve been read many times! At the same time, spine-breaking, dog-earing pages or laying books down open on their faces is abusive. They really shorten the life of that book. Once a paperback has its spine broken, it\’s all downhill from there. Eventually it\’s just going to fall apart. That\’s why I prefer to get hardbound books, and if I do end up adding a paperback (usually trade size) to my library, I try to treat them gently.
It\’s sometimes hard to teach my family the same respect- my daughter does things like jump on her books (augh!) or use them as construction materials (okay, but at some point the building gets abandoned and then the books end up on the floor in reach of feet). And my husband takes books along on his commute. I love helping him choose titles to read on the train, but sometimes cringe when they come back. Hardbacks are too heavy for him to want to carry about, but paperbacks get jostled around in his bag and re-emerge worse for wear. It\’s terrible, but I\’m often reluctant to loan him one of my own books and prefer he takes along a library copy.