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January 20, 2004
TT: Tic of the week
Courtesy of Supermaud (scroll down), a piece by a Brit who rips up the books he's reading--for convenience:I started by buying cheap books, like those Wordsworth editions, when I was off on holiday. To tear the pages out as I read them reduced my baggage burden. After all, these books cost £1 - less than a Sunday paper. And you wouldn't take even The Sunday Telegraph all round the Alpujarras and bring it back neatly folded to Luton a fortnight later. Then I weighed a Wordsworth Woman in White against an old World's Classic. The World's Classic won by ounces. It did even better without its cover. And it only cost £2....
Most books are hard to fit in a pocket without making you look like a trainee drug smuggler. But you can easily tear out 64 or even 128 pages and bend them into a back pocket. It makes the hands gloriously free on a walk.
Never in a million years could I do such a thing. Just to read about it makes my skin prickle. I can't even underline or highlight passages in the books I own--even though I approve in theory of underlining, and I love reading other people's marginalia in used books and library copies. Yet I'm not a book collector, nor have I ever been attached to the Book as Object (as readers of this posting will recall).
What, then, stops me from ripping up the paperbacks I own, much less writing in them? In what deeply buried layer of my psyche is this inhibition rooted? And why, given all this, am I a compulsive dogearer? (Sad but true.) Amusing speculations will be published in this space, so long as they stop short of outright obscenity.
Posted January 20, 2004 10:13 AM
