No Respect!

by

Nicki Leone

So this is the column where I lose everyone’s respect.

It’s no secret I love books, that reading is not just a past time for me but a career, a life’s pursuit. Books mean so much to me that I destroyed one house with the weight of my collection, and created something like a shrine in the best room of another. When books pile up on floors, bow over-taxed shelves, and cover every available flat surface, I tend to see it as a flaw in the space for not accommodating itself better to the demands of the library, rather than a character flaw in myself for bringing more books into a space even now not large enough to hold them. “One of these days I’m going to come home and find there is no more room in the house for me,” says my girlfriend periodically, as she negotiates her way around various stacks and piles. I smile in denial, but avoid answering.

But although I accumulate books, and although I’d rather be reading them than doing almost—almost!—anything else, I am a very poor keeper—a fact that was brought home to me one day when a message-board discussion turned to the usefulness of book jackets. Much to my shock, I discovered most of these folks were very particular about their books—that those who eschewed hardcovers often did so not just because of the prices, but because the covers tended to get worn. Those who avoided paperbacks had similar motivations about bindings. Some actually covered their book jackets in shiny plastic protection. Some removed the jackets altogether lest they become ripped or bent. Sometimes people even took the jackets off while reading, and then carefully replaced them.

I was suddenly glad that this discussion was happening online, behind the relative anonymity of the Internet, instead of, say in my living room, where all my reading sins were on such brilliantly lit display.

Do I read books with the jackets on? Hell yeah, I do. Do I try to be careful not to damage them? Um. Can I plead the fifth?

In my defense, when I was younger I had very little money (actually, I don’t have a lot of money now, either, but I was really destitute in my college years) so I tended to get books in secondhand shops and didn’t fuss about things like red and black remainder marks, or the initials of previous owners inside the covers. What a book looked like was somewhat secondary. Books were meant to be read.

Even twenty years spent as a bookseller, a vocation that certainly teaches you to appreciate and value the beauty, the look and the feel of a book as an object, did not rid me of this original notion—that books were for reading, first and foremost. So I have always been a little cavalier about how I keep my books, and rather casual in how I read them.  In fact, I’ve collected quite a repertoire of bad reading habits. If a love of reading is a formal banquet, I’m the person sitting in corner eating with my hands and chewing with my mouth open.

I turn down page corners.

I do. All the time and only because I’m usually too lazy to find something to serve as a bookmark. All my favorite books have turned down corners. Sometimes I turn them down just to mark a spot for later—just because I liked something on that particular page.  In fact, if you don’t see turned down corners in one of my books, it’s a good indication that I didn’t like it.

I break bindings.

Without an atom of guilt, just because I don’t like having to hold the pages apart. I want a book to stay open to the spot where I am reading. This means that I’m not above breaking a binding not just once, but two or three times if necessary.  I’m also apt to place books open face down on tables or chairs, and more than once I’ve fallen asleep with an open book and rolled over on it sometime during the night. This always has an effect on the binding. Most of the spines on my favorite paperbacks are cracked and almost illegible.

I use inappropriate things as book marks.

When I do use bookmarks, that is. I have books that still have candy wrappers in between the pages, box tops, old CD-ROMs, the flatter sort of refrigerator magnets and many, many versions of those cards you get in magazines to renew your subscription. I even have books that still have paperclips on pages to mark certain spots. Some of those paperclips have long since rusted onto the paper.  When I’m reading a book that has a jacket, I use the front or back flap to mark my place, which is not recommended practice if you like your jackets to stay clean and unscathed.

I’m not above writing in books.

I haven’t done this in a while, but I used to highlight, underline, scribble and otherwise mutilate the books I read. I got out of the habit after working in a bookstore—they tended to frown on employees who defaced the merchandise—and perhaps because, as I got older, I felt less inclined to doodle my responses in the margins, and more inclined to write them up in essays and reviews I might get paid for.

I’m grubby.

I have an addiction to cheese-powdered popcorn and many of my books are suffering for it. (This is only a marginal improvement over a past addiction for ranch-flavored Doritos.) Next to reading, I like to eat and read, drink coffee and read, nibble and read. I’ve spilled things (usually coffee), dropped things, smeared things and shmooshed things into books by accident. It gets especially bad in April and May, which here in North Carolina is strawberry season. Books I read in April and May often have pink streaks on the jackets and edges. I use books as drink coasters, to prop up things, and as a surface to write on when I’m hastily scribbling down a phone number or shopping list. I don’t dust, and the more remote corners of my bookcases, as well as the oldest untouched piles can get thick with cobwebs.

I have pets.

I usually have dogs and cats. Right now, one dog and two-and-a-half cats (the half cat is a semi-feral I am currently trying to coax close enough so I can catch it and give it some shots). But the count has been as high as five and five. So there is a fair amount of fur and hair in the house and on the bookshelves and, it goes without saying, in the books. Some of the books have been hacked upon, I’m sorry to say. And even sorrier to say that I didn’t notice until months later. A few had something killed near them, if the blood spatter across the spines is anything to go by. And one cat took a liking to my pop-up Encyclopedia Prehistorica, and has been using it as a scratching post. The book’s corners are now frayed beyond recognition, and the cover itself looks to be from about the time it supposedly portrays.

I’m generous.

I don’t have a problem lending out books, and I don’t make a fuss when they come back (if they come back) worse for wear, bent, faded from sitting in someone’s car, or gritty from a trip to the beach. I don’t mind visitors taking out books and looking at them or paging through them. I didn’t bat an eye when the band drummer scotch-taped a couple of them to her set to change the tone of the toms and the snare. Well, actually, that isn’t quite true—I did say something to her (what is it with drummers, anyway? Why are they all nuts?) but it wasn’t about how she was taping a copy of the collected stories of Philip K. Dick to the drum head. It was more along the lines of—“Hey, those are cool stories! Did you know that guy wrote the book that became Blade Runner?” She didn’t.

I had words with my girlfriend after band practice was over. Not because the drummer got that tacky tape stuff all over some of my books. I didn’t have a problem with that. No, it was because she didn’t even want to read them.

To not even bother to read them—not to even give it a shot—that is the only unforgivable sin you can commit against books.

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this with the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.