Dog Ears

A recent conversation with Gary.

[Stage direction: Gary has been coming in and out of the room to re-enact recent football plays and demand attention.]

Gary: "And then the quarterback - HEY STOP READING YOUR BOOK AND PAY ATTENTION!"

[Ellen dog-ears book to keep her place, and puts the book down and clasps her hands so she doesn't flip her husband off.]

Gary: "That's a big book. How are you going to keep your place?"

Ellen: "You just saw me dog-ear it."

Gary: "YOU DOG-EAR YOUR BOOKS THAT IS AWFUL HERE LET ME GET YOU A BOOKMARK."

I may have asked before, but is this true? Does one not dog-ear books?

Comments

[KC]

Yes. One does not dog-ear books. *shudder*

That said, if it's "dog-ear the book or spousal homicide" then dog-ear your book. :-) Also, your book = your book-maintenance protocol decisions, and while yes, dog-earing books can result in brittle page-corner break-offs and also make it less smooth to flip through, eh, it's not as bad as dropping them in bath water *or* worse, never reading them.

[Allison McCaskill]

I haven't dog-eared a book in years, although I'm sure I used to. Do you do it to any book? Like, a fancy hardcover? Or just mass market paperbacks? I wouldn't dog-ear library books even when I was a dog-earer. I have a large collection of pretty bookmarks at this point and I enjoy using them when I'm reading paper books.

[TheQueen]

KC - I like a lived-in book. I like it when a book falls open to a certain page, or when my cookbook is filthy on my favorite recipes. If I dropped it in bath water that would be fine too. It's not like I have the only copy!
Allison McCaskill - I do it to all books except my leather-bound ones, because they have the little ribbons sewn in to the spine. I love those "bookmarks" best.

[KC]

I only like the book falling open to a certain page when it has a good reason; if it's because the spine is cracked and it's a random page, I Do Not Like That. Being able to find your favorite recipes in a cookbook by flipping through and finding the grubby pages: yeeees. I guess: if the dog-eared bits are your favorite passages from a well-loved book, I would probably like that a lot, although I tend to use post-it flags, but otherwise, flip-through-ability is a very high value for me, which I suspect is partly due to a not-photographic-but-definitely-visual memory that allows me to sometimes remember *where* on a page the thing I am looking for was, and thus if I can flip through smoothly, I can often identify the location of a specific sentence in less than a minute, which is... handy. I also haaaate it when books flip over on me - when I've been paging through smoothly and then a chunk flops over and farewell, wherever I was - and that is associated with damaged pages/spine for me. (if you're holding pages back by the top corner due to a weird reading-in-bed position and then you flip one page and instead two pages start falling and then you reach to grab them and accidentally let go of the chunk of book you were holding back... anyway. If I could be less clumsy, that would be even *more* useful than an entire lack of dog ears, but. Here we are.)

I also have strong opinions about too-tight binding, bad page paper [the kind that has a tendency to crack apart after a while if you dog-ear it, and that *definitely* is not going to last in a non-fragile condition for 50 years), and deckled edges on anything you want to actually read straight through (although none of these three stops me from getting a book, it does sometimes decide me between editions).

[TheQueen]

KC - I hate it when pages fall out, but that's it. Not very particular. I had a hard time understanding what you meant by pages you hold back -- like with a paperback, you roll up some pages and fold them over?

[KC]

So, lying on your side, book on its side but open, holding the still-to-come part of the book by a corner, and you slide your thumb off *one* page so it falls to the other side and you can see the next page. Ideally. When it goes wrong, it ends up more like you're shuffling cards badly and a whole chunk of book whops over onto the page you just finished reading, instead of one page.

I think I might need a whiteboard to explain this one. Sorry.

[TheQueen]

KC - no, I see it exactly.