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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4169 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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https://old.reddit.com/r/madlads/s/yV09R82gov

I came across this reddit post of a guy who cuts his books in half. I found it funny that this triggered people in the comments. Many people refuse to fold pages or write in their books. I don't see what the big deal is. To me a book is just a tool. I understand taking care to preserve semi-rare books, but these were books you can just walk into any bookstore and buy.

I used to know someone who would even try to avoid creasing the spine. But I've also heard about a guy who would rip pages of shlocky fiction as he read them to keep his place. Where are you on the spectrum?

I've always had a strange reverence for physical books, and the idea of cutting them in half seems macabre in some way.

I'd put myself somewhere in the middle. I treat all of my stuff with some degree of respect. I'm not like super cautious and offended if they get some wear and tear, but I'm not going to deliberately damage them.

Someone who cuts their books in half is comparable to someone who cuts their furniture or plates in half. Like, you're allowed to do that, but unless you're doing a very specific project that requires this, why would you? Now you have torn up damaged stuff instead of nice new stuff.

Cutting your books in half isn't really damaging them if you do it right. It's just turning a long book into two shorter books. Closer to something like removing the back seat from your car to save weight.

Cutting books in half...removing the back seat of a car...both are things that save weight--and that haven't been done in America since the creators of That 70s Show were teenagers.

I'm really lost, people remove the backseats of sports cars to save weight or from trucks/vans to improve cargo space all the time, and I cut a lot of texts in half in college to make them more useable (notably Don Quixote).

Sorry to be confusing--but I've genuinely never removed a seat from a vehicle that had seats that could fold down to make room for cargo. I wonder if it's because I was raised in the blue tribe?

It's more common with motorsports enthusiasts and blue collar workers. Motorsports to reduce weight, workers because even folded flat they take up room. While cutting a book in half is common with literature students. I can see where it would seem strange if you've never done it, like you're ruining it, but in those circumstances it makes perfect sense, you're making it more useful.

Most of my physical books were bought used and may already be damaged or contain writing, but I generally don't do anything to make their condition worse. Growing up I mostly read library books, so my habit has always been not to write in, fold, or tear them. Generally I find things like highlighting and taking notes on the margin a waste of time and unnecessary for my own comprehension.

Post a screencap perhaps - it's not accessible.

That reminds me of when I had to write the prompt for a creative writing group I was a part of, in which the prompt was to be inspired by a famous work of speculative fiction. I chose Fahrenheit 451, the prompt being to write a story in which the destruction of books was a virtuous act. I got kicked out of the group, the only people who didn't treat me like I'd suggested fucking each other's pets were the two members younger than me. I was very pissed off, I thought it was a great prompt.

It was a great prompt. Those people treated you very poorly indeed.

Historically I cared very well for my books, and I am intentionally trying to change that and become a margin writer because it seems fun/good/helpful. I did the "cut the book in half" thing for a lot of books in college though.

I was definitely raised to care for books, and I think this reflects a generational thing. I thought of books as important items to protect, both because they were expensive (at scale) and because the knowledge in them was valuable to preserve. Books were pricy, destroying them would be playing into the hands of the big corporate booksellers. Used bookstores existed, but before the internet buying books secondhand was so haphazard as to be mostly useless, and obviously you never write in a library book. I also have a natural prissiness towards damaging anything, one of my major flaws as a mechanic is a refusal to just smack the damn thing for fear of breaking it. Comedically, this comes out when my wife and I lift weights together. I rerack 350 silently, she reracks 135 like she's trying to make as much noise as possible.

Today, preserving the knowledge in them is achieved through digital means, and for various reasons books are cheap (I make more money, and any book I want I could download a pdf in a few minutes of search, and there are more classics I want to read on Project Gutenberg than I'll ever actually get through anyway). The risk, see @KulakRevolt 's latest, is that publishers will stop producing them, booksellers will stop selling them (who would have believed, watching You've Got Mail that Borders would be bankrupt and AOL irrelevant today?) the books I buy in print I am very intentional about as an act of supporting my local small bookstore. I'm not buying them to preserve the knowledge in them, but to preserve the supply chain of getting them to me, I want to give money to the local store that stocks it and the small publishers that produce it. So I'm much more amenable to destroying a book as I'm reading it.

At the same time, taking notes while doing something is a good way to jog memory. And a friend who lives far away and I have taken to sending each other annotated copies of books we loved.

And a friend who lives far away and I have taken to sending each other annotated copies of books we loved.

This is a genius level remote-book-club idea. If one were so inclined, it would probably be possible to set up a marketing blog explaining how to do this, inviting people to register which books they're doing this with, ranking the most common, and then dropping affiliate links to generate income.

Or some sort of variant of Reese Witherspoon's crowdsourced book-to-film audiences

I rerack 350 silently, she reracks 135 like she's trying to make as much noise as possible.

SAY IT WITH YOUR CHEST (NSFW Audio)

I am definitely of the "treat books well" persuasion. I would write in a book or otherwise damage it if I had a good reason to, but honestly I don't find there are good reasons to. Any notes I could take in the margins I can just as easily take in a notebook, I find highlighting useless, etc. Even if I could easily get another copy, I'd rather keep the $ in my pocket and just keep my copy in good condition.

My freshman year of college, I wanted to raise the bed in my dorm room to make some space for storage but didn't want to buy bed risers, and so when I noticed our local textbook store giving out free hardcover copies of old editions of textbooks (I think these were genuinely decades old, not ones from last year with some problem sets changed), I took a whole lot of them and used stacks of them as bed risers. No one was particularly triggered, but I recall at least one dorm-mate kinda being disgusted and saying that he felt it was like book burning, but he couldn't explain why.

My girlfriend and I managed to literally break the bed in an AirBnB we were staying at.

When we checked in, some poor bastard studying law had left a doorstopper of a textbook in the cupboard, and it was handily repurposed to keep it from sagging. It was a miracle the owner didn't try and bill us for damages.

To make up for our sins, we left a similarly sized pair of binders full of maybe a kilogram's worth of notes and clinical vignettes, it would have likely been cheaper to book the course again rather than try and pay for the extra luggage space.

I don't care much about preserving books, hell I don't care about physical books in the least, since I am perfectly content to read on my phone, though my iPad is a necessity for textbooks.

Fold them, spit on them, use them as TP, why should I care?* Unless they're some kind of historical novelty or rarity, in which case it depends on if you have ownership, and I certainly don't condone the abuse of books taken from a library.

*A little known fact is that most Hindu Indians venerate books to a degree, because they represent the goddess of knowledge. Stepping on books or placing them by my feet always got me scolded as a kid, though I think people care less these days.

Somewhere in the middle. When I was a kid I literally devoured some of my books. Yep, pica. Now I am much more careful, never write in my books and leave dust jackets on the shelf to avoid roughing them up, but I will crack the spine if it won't lie flat and won't worry about the corners of a hard cover book getting crumpled. I will put a soft cover book into a sheet protector (TIL it's not called a file in English) before putting it in my bag, though.

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