People
get interrupted all the time while they’re reading. Many people will place
their book opened and face-down nearby while they deal with the distraction;
other people – those who can fully expect to enter Heaven - use bookmarks.
There is a special place in Hell though, for those people who turn down the
corner of their page and shut the book.
A
book that has suffered this indignity is referred to as “dog-eared” for the
comparison which the disfigurement begs. The resulting crease across the top
(or bottom) corner of the page means that the book will never close properly afterwards
and will cause the text block to “fan”, meaning that whenever it gets put back
on the shelf it runs the risk of being further damaged in the process.
The
worst instance of this that I’ve seen was while sitting behind a reader on a
bus. When he finished reading both sides of a leaf, he folded the top corner of
the left-hand page all the way down into the gutter of the book and pressed it
down carefully into a sharp crease. For the next page he folded the bottom corner of the page up in the same
fashion. Rinse and repeat. The result was that the book started to resemble
some weird paper-craft project like one of those fold-out Christmas stars. It
was the worst bus trip of my life.
Of
course it’s not as bad as - I forget who did this: I keep thinking it’s Samuel
Johnson but he’s too early; possibly G.K. Chesterton? – anyway, whoever it was,
they would read a book while travelling up to London by train. As they finished
reading the leaf, they tore it out of the
book, and tossed it out the window. There’s an especially deep and scalding
bit of Hell reserved for this fellow...
In
my day-to-day work routine, I’m constantly pulling bookmarks out of books which
I’m cataloguing for sale; these get given back to customers wherever they’re
presentable enough. Where they’re damaged, written on, or detrimental to the
book, we recycle them in other ways. Some bookmarks are not well-designed: any
bookmark which is made of metal, for example is a big no-no. Reject them out of
hand. Those that have tassels are alright, but please make sure that no part of
the string lies between the pages because string is not flat and will deform
the book. The best bookmarks are those that come as part of the binding, in the
form of ribbons.
Sales
receipts, leaves, concert tickets: lots of things end up as bookmarks and not
all of them are good for the book. One thing that always freaks me out when I’m
cleaning up a book, is finding a piece of toilet tissue in a book, used to mark
a page. I can’t tell you how disgusting I find this. Please just don’t.
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