Always a Lender or a Borrower Be—Unless You’ve Lent Recently

by

Lauren Roberts

Lending a book is an act of faith, a trust that the friend you lend it to understands the relationship you have with that book. You can trust that person completely, but the return of the book in the same condition that you lent it invariably brings a palpable sigh of relief.

Yet, despite the inherent worry that goes along with it, the act of lending a book brings an incredible joy. A beloved book is closely bound up with the innermost part of your selfhood, and so its lending becomes an intimate link tied up with fondness and intimacy. You, the book and the person you lend it to have, in essence, bonded.

When you lend a cherished book, you are also removing (albeit temporarily) a special physical object that has a material place in your home. It can be hard to live without its constant presence, and the thought of someone treating it with less care than you is unbearable.

At least that’s true for me. I love my books passionately and I only lend them to friends who feel the same about their books as I do mine. When I lend them, I know that the books will enjoy the caresses of equally appreciative hands and that the words will kindle a new mind as it did mine. I know the book will come home to me (not least because I now keep a list on my computer of who has what and how long it has been out). But the unspoken fear never goes away.

Unfortunately, that fear turned into reality for me recently. And it has sadly altered the way I feel about a good friend because I lent the book with the expectation that she would treat my things the way I would treat her things. I didn’t get that, and what I thought I knew about her I have now realized was wrong. I won’t stop lending, but I will be much more selective about the books I lend and the people to whom I lend them.

What I want to say to her and to my readers is this: Borrowing a book involves an even greater trust than lending one. It is and it should be an awesome burden to bear the responsibility for another’s cherished book because when you hold in your hands a borrowed book, you hold more than just a physical object. You hold the friendship, the heart and the soul of the owner. If you can’t or won’t understand that, don’t borrow from me.

Because I believe that there are several self-made rules I follow when I borrow a book—for my peace of mind as well as the owner’s. I try never to keep a book for more than a week. If I haven’t finished it in that time I make a point of calling and asking for permission to keep it longer. I don’t open the pages any wider than I need to for reading. I make sure that my hands are clean before I pick it up, and I never read it while eating or drinking.

I admit that I’m an unusual borrower. Borrowed books, as has often been pointed out, can disappear permanently. Oh, the borrower intends to read it but something else comes up that takes priority. The book is set aside "for the moment." That moment stretches out slowly until one day the borrower sees the book sitting where it was left and re-shelves it among her own library. The passage of time has the made original owner too embarrassed to ask for it back; perhaps its lending has even been forgotten. The book has moved on.

The fact is that the lending and borrowing of beloved books is about more than the books themselves. It’s about the fragile relationship of people, those who read the books, those who share the books and even those who write and publish them. Thoughts become words; words become a page; multiple pages bound by string or glue become a book; the book impacts each life as it enters one, leaves that and re-enters another, giving of itself without end. What better reason could there be to lend or borrow a book? Or to take care with those you lend or borrow?

Since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to almost anyone who will listen. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it