On Damaging Books
Mar. 17th, 2007 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unforthSo I'm finally getting around to adding chunks of my fantasy and science fiction collection to LibraryThing, and decided to start by adding the books I've actually read, rather than just all the random other books I own. I'm sitting here, holding my original copy of David Eddings' The Sapphire Rose. I've had this book since I was in 5th grade. And OMG it's a mess. I doodled on it, I wrote my homework in the inner cover, I used a highlighter to pick out choice lines, I had to attach the cover with tape, I tore up the front page, I used a read marker to underline every capitalized word on the first page. Why on earth did I do these things? It's not like I didn't love my books, I did, like, I really, really, really did. And yet here sits this book, a total mess. Is this because I used to get bored in class and my books became my test subjects to kill time? (better to doodle on a book than in my notes???) Was it because really, I wanted to be reading, and even though I couldn't the book was still the focus of my attention, so got the brunt of my restlessness? I wish I knew what the heck I was thinking! I treat my books so well now. And yet my childhood copies are all awful
This has been on my mind anyway because of working on my portfolio for NBSS. One of the books in my portfolio is my first personal restoration job - I brought in a book near and dear to my heart, my childhood (and my uncle's childhood!) copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes. Though spared doodles, this book was also falling apart thanks to having been carried around in bookbags for weeks on end. So I took it, fixed the hinges and repaired the spine, and put it in my portfolio. Ever since then, I've been thinking about other books of mine that I could fix up. So many of my old books are just falling apart, and even though they are shitty mass market editions, they're important to me, so I've been planning what I could do to restore them. I have grand plans to rebind my original copy of A Spell for Chameleon which, no matter what I might think about Piers Anthony's writing now that I'm older, is a book that changed my life (a long with Dealing with Dragons) ...I've been debating how much is worth doing, and if it will still be special to me if I've restored it. The Sherlock Holmes became more special, but it didn't need as much work as Spell for Chameleon or my original copy of Eye of the World would, not even close. Maybe I'll take one of my other copies of Spell for Chameleon (I've worn out, oh, 4 or 5 copies of it) and restore it and see how I feel about it then. I just don't know...
All of this was sort of a segue into something I've been meaning to offer, by the by. I think I'm not proficient enough to offer my meager skills to restoring other people's books. If anyone's got a book they want an enclosure of some sort for (a cloth covered box, for example) I can do that easily; if someone wants something more drastic done (tear repair, that sort of thing) I'd be willing to try, but I'm still relatively inexperienced, so you might want to wait if it is something important to you. :)
Edit: And here's my childhood copy of Man From Mundania, which I apparently decided it would be a good idea to impale with something, because there are more than a dozen small holes in the cover, many of which go multiple pages in, and it's not bug damage. Oh, and apparently my homework that day was to "Find out about galalaeos experiment on gravity." How was I such a dumb child? I don't understand!
This has been on my mind anyway because of working on my portfolio for NBSS. One of the books in my portfolio is my first personal restoration job - I brought in a book near and dear to my heart, my childhood (and my uncle's childhood!) copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes. Though spared doodles, this book was also falling apart thanks to having been carried around in bookbags for weeks on end. So I took it, fixed the hinges and repaired the spine, and put it in my portfolio. Ever since then, I've been thinking about other books of mine that I could fix up. So many of my old books are just falling apart, and even though they are shitty mass market editions, they're important to me, so I've been planning what I could do to restore them. I have grand plans to rebind my original copy of A Spell for Chameleon which, no matter what I might think about Piers Anthony's writing now that I'm older, is a book that changed my life (a long with Dealing with Dragons) ...I've been debating how much is worth doing, and if it will still be special to me if I've restored it. The Sherlock Holmes became more special, but it didn't need as much work as Spell for Chameleon or my original copy of Eye of the World would, not even close. Maybe I'll take one of my other copies of Spell for Chameleon (I've worn out, oh, 4 or 5 copies of it) and restore it and see how I feel about it then. I just don't know...
All of this was sort of a segue into something I've been meaning to offer, by the by. I think I'm not proficient enough to offer my meager skills to restoring other people's books. If anyone's got a book they want an enclosure of some sort for (a cloth covered box, for example) I can do that easily; if someone wants something more drastic done (tear repair, that sort of thing) I'd be willing to try, but I'm still relatively inexperienced, so you might want to wait if it is something important to you. :)
Edit: And here's my childhood copy of Man From Mundania, which I apparently decided it would be a good idea to impale with something, because there are more than a dozen small holes in the cover, many of which go multiple pages in, and it's not bug damage. Oh, and apparently my homework that day was to "Find out about galalaeos experiment on gravity." How was I such a dumb child? I don't understand!
