Sometimes they came in handy. When my daughter was an older infant, she insisted I sit right outside her open door as she fell asleep. Situated by a bookcase, I used the time to read tattered copies of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (very good) and Young Torless, about sadistic sex between young boys at a military academy. I suggested we did not need the latter but my husband insisted no household was complete without a copy of this obscure Austrian classic from 1906.
Later my daughter and I had to read Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions for a mother daughter book club and sure enough, an old paperback copy was on our shelf. How convenient. I read it first, fortunately for me. Each time I turned a page the page broke off because it was so brittle (appropriate that a Kurt Vonnegut book self-destructs). I tried to close the book each time I finished a page and to reopen it at the next page. This helped and the last third of the copy was still intact when I handed it to my daughter. When she finished, I wrapped a rubber-band around it and returned it to the shelf. Everyone else in the book club availed herself of one of the multiple intact copies in our city’s library system.
The majority of our books did nothing but create dust, mold, and get even more outdated than when we last moved them. Very occasionally we rearranged them and got new shelves, but more books would pile up on the floor.
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