Terry Teachout,

whose arts writing I’ve always enjoyed in Commentary, has a quote about someone who tears pages out of the books he’s reading to make them easier to carry around. Teachout could never do such a thing in a million years, nor does he highlight passages in books, “even though I approve in theory of underlining, and I love reading other people?s marginalia in used books and library copies.”

I, too, grew up believing (1) that owning books is good and noble and that you should own a lot if you’re an educated person, and (2) that books are sacred and that you shouldn’t deface them in any way. I’ve totally rejected both of these — but not totally, since (1) it’s still hard for me to get rid of my books, and I’m actively trying (I gave away over 100 books last year and hope to do the same this year), and (2) I don’t make markings in my own books even though I believe that you should do whatever it takes to get more out of the book, because it’s your appreciation of the contents of the book that’s important, not the book itself. (On Teachout and the sacredness of books, see here.)

As with Teachout, this last inhibition is in some “deeply buried layer of my psyche.” I hope to overcome it someday; I’m trying.

UPDATE: Reader Dan Schwartz (and I) recommend Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, where she discusses this phenomenon. (Thanks to my friend the lovely and talented Stacey Tappan for giving me this book once. Anne Fadiman is the daughter of Clifton Fadiman, whose Mathematical Magpie, a collection of math-related humor and stories, I grew up with.) Anne Fadiman writes:

[J]ust as there is more than one way to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book. [A chamberlain who was horrified when my brother left his book face down on his bedside table] believed in courtly love. A book’s physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller. The Fadiman family believed in carnal love. To us, a book’s words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.

Hilaire Belloc, a courtly lover, once wrote:

Child! do not throw this book about;
Refrain from the unholy pleasure
Of cutting all the pictures out!
Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.

What would Belloc have thought of my father, who, in order to reduce the weight of the paperbacks he read on airplanes, tore off the chapters he had completed and threw them in the trash? What would he have thought of my husband, who reads in the sauna, where heat-fissioned pages drop like petals in a storm? What would he have thought (here I am making a brazen attempt to upgrade my family by association) of Thomas Jefferson, who chopped up a priceless 1572 first edition of Plutarch’s works in Greek in order to interleave its pages with an English translation? Or of my old editor Byron Dobell, who, when he was researching an article on the Grand Tour, once stayed up all night reading six volumes of Boswell’s journals and, as he puts it, “sucked them like a giant mongoose”? Byron told me, “I didn’t give a damn about the condition of those volumes. In order to get where I had to go, I underlined them, wrote in them, shredded them, dropped them, tore them to pieces, and did things to them that we can’t discuss in public.”

Byron loves books. Really, he does. . . .

To coin a phrase, Read the whole thing.

In other news, reader David Sands prefers BookDarts, and reader Andrew Solovay says travel-induced book-ripping happened on an episode of JAG. Reader Trevor Anderson says that book lover Bernard Levin did this too, with cheap paperbacks. I say, we’ll have progressed when we do this too (write, not necessarily rip) with our imposing hardcovers!