Book Scars

by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

Inspired by a recent article in the New York Times 'What we Do to Books' I thought I would scour my bookshelves and look for the 'life scars' that I have inflicted on my books over the years. As the article points out, there has been a lot of discussion about the effect that reading books has on us but far less attention has been paid on the effect that we (the readers) have on them (the books).

Now, I don't consider myself to be a book vandalizer - I've never been one to underline or annotate in pen or highlighter (pencil, maybe) and I certainly would never deliberately rip a page or desecrate a cover...nonetheless, my books certainly have a 'lived in quality' that is worth remembering.

First there are the children's books - Enid Blyton stories with grubby, Vegemite-y finger prints on some of the pages, dog-eared school books and the beautiful collection of Little Grey Rabbit books that my sister scribbled over (luckily for me, even as a toddler she appreciated pictures and only ever scribbled on the text). Then there are the teenage books - my copy of Wuthering Heights that always falls open at the "I cannot live without my soul" page, the copy of Jane Eyre that you dare not open too wide for fear that the whole book will fall to bits. There are the much loved 1960's Georgette Heyer paperbacks I nicked from my mum's bookshelves which still smell musty and romantic.

As a move across the shelf I find textbooks from law school that are still embarrassingly pristine (probably because I rarely opened them) and history books bursting with post-it notes from recent research explorations (which, like all good Victorian expeditions, have been frequently abandoned or gotten lost). Then there are the holiday reads - some still smelling of suncream with tiny grains of sand lodged in their spines. Of course, there are also those deliciously pure and untainted volumes of the unread pile - waiting for my grubby mitts to take hold and destroy.

One of the great joys of owning a library of books is that they reflect all the experiences of reading. From the heavy tombs which required constant setting down to endure (and hence, no longer lie flat) to the light reads that are dog-eared and bent from frequent 'comfort' reads. To look at a used book is to see a lifetime of a reading (and the damage we inflict while doing so).

From the coffee stains on covers, to indecipherable annotations; from pages folded and crumpled to rips and tears, blots and foxing, a book is an amazing physical record of its reader.

With an e-reader there will be only smudges and fingerprints on the screen to remind us.

So what kind of damage do you inflict on books? Is there a book in particular that (like a face) bears the scars of a particular encounter? Do you think with the increase in e-books we will appreciate the physicality of our paper books all the more? Or will we lose the joy of opening one of old books to find some nugget of the past (a boarding pass used as a book mark, a theatre ticket wedged between the pages) inside?