Child! do not throw this book about Refrain from the unholy pleasure Of cutting all the pictures out! Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.
Strangely enough, the first time I tried to read [The Lord of the Rings] I was on holiday in Florida. I dropped it in the pool my first day there. If that's not a Pippin thing to do, I don't know what is.
A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.
Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.
My mistake was in ever opening the books.
There are few sights sadder than a ruined book.
I mean your borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
When I was young, I colored in the line drawings in vintage editions of the Oz books that had been handed down through generations in my family. This was a bad thing to do.
The year after I graduated college I had a job in a library. When people underlined passages in the library books, or made notes in the margins, the books were sent to me. I erased the lines and the notes. Yes, that was my job.
I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.
Great collections of books are subject to certain accidents besides the damp, the worms, and the rats; one not less common is that of the borrowers, not to say a word of the purloiners
I couldn't imagine anyone ever reading a book enough to make it look like that. It looked like it had been driven over by a school bus after someone had taken a bath with it.
