I Like My Covers to Look New
No cracks! No bends! No curls!
Some love books that look well-worn. It’s physical evidence of the love someone has that their book is worn down with finger indents. Some see them as chronicles of where it was kept and went as the reader took it with them.
I prefer mine to look pristine and new. Fresh as if they were just born from the printers.
In the same vein as dying on the inside when I drop specks of food onto crisp pages or (worse) spill water onto it and watch the pages ripple and fall limp, I never crease my books. I caress paperbacks so the spines don’t crack. I watch how I hold the covers so I don’t leave indents or curl the covers when I put them down. I don’t even think to hold my books with the front cover wrapped around the spine. I see them as doing damage.
Sometimes, wear-and-tear happens by accident (I apologise to my covers where I mistakenly chucked them into backpacks or absent-mindedly sat without looking and without realising the cover had bent). Sometimes, it’s just a natural process of picking up a book too often (still a bit peeved by the plastic laminate on my House of Hades book having rolled back and across the front).
I don’t like wearing down my covers because I like to think books have souls. They feel pain if I crease their covers or pages, they ache if I hold the covers so tightly that the front cover bounces upwards in a curled form when lying flat.
Hey…that’s cool, isn’t it? Our ability to empathise? Sometimes so much so that we begin to imagine inanimate objects having feelings and treating them like people.
I don’t like wearing down my covers because I like to think books have souls.
Emotions. A cornerstone of the human experience. That’s one of the reasons why we love stories: they make us feel.
Covers, for all their purposes, are an extension of the stories they represent. They incite our curiosities, evoke certain emotions. The stories may be what readers want, but getting them to want the story and get them to make the effort to know more requires some special effort. Part of the effort is made by the cover.
Covers are hard work. For that, I feel better treating them well. I feel better keeping them looking like new. That doesn’t mean the stories they protect never travel with me.
I’m curious: how do you guys treat your books? Are you a spine cracker? A batterer of covers? Or do you baby your books like I do?
At the end of the day, how we treat our books and experience them is up to us. There’s no right way…well, maybe as long the book is still intact.