(Notoriously, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But what about its spine, and other essential parts?)
“They” say: you can’t judge a book by its cover.
And that may be true, for at least some circumstances and reprints. But next time you want to accurately judge the contents of a book before, you know, reading it – I’ve got a cheat code for you: check the spine.
You can definitely judge a book’s contents by its backbone.
To wit:
My childhood understanding of the English language depended upon copious amounts of duct tape. Our household OED (196? edition) was…in a state that was an accurate visual metaphor for a lingua franca concocted as a confused love/hate-child of Old French and Older German.
At some point post-Berlin Wall, the original binding gave up on its ability to contain multitudes. But the contents continued, by the grace of gray-sheened sticky sheets carefully layered on in parallel precision. To think: I might have never learned how to spell or use the word “syzygy” without this intervention.
A second piece of evidence: another 196? household relic, The Lord of the Rings.
The spines were already missing. However, book entropy doesn’t rely on spines alone. No, the covers and contents, I was to learn, are all fair game.
The first time I read that trilogy, I was able to literally read from “cover to cover”. Hopefully I savored the experience, because never again: maybe half of each cover made it through oh, half of each book? Not the most stable of materials, the mid-century paperback.
By the second read-through, the last sections of Fellowship had also dropped off into the void, or rather, crumbled like Frodo’s will at Mt. Doom.
Please consider that there was a lot of back matter to those editions: Mr. Tolkien’s linguistic commentary and references to the Silmarillion, as I recall. So effectively it was about a third of the printed matter of the book that just – disintegrated.
And then there was the summer I had a pair of cargo shorts with button-flap pockets the perfect size for the average early-2000s YA paperback (thank you for ruining that for us, JKR). So for a while I was packing a Tamora Pierce per leg… because you know, decisions are hard when the reading’s that good. I believe both pants and paperbacks gave up about the same time.
One of the most interesting things to me is going through the paperback section at secondhand book shops. You can tell what books people loved enough to reread.
Pull out one of those illegible, vertical-white-line-spined books for a moment. Check the page edges for that other classic tell: page-turning. You know, the “I don’t have a bookmark so let me turn down the top corner of the page” move?
Let’s just say you can pretty accurately clock the “good parts” (all contract-required three of them) of any romantasy/sci fi/thriller without having to read through the whole angsty/explainy/feelings/political intrigue/training montage of… the rest of the book. Oh, AND the spine might be particularly cracked to correspond with about that point.
And yes, I know all this isn’t good for the book. Yes, it damages it. Yes, I’m probably a book-killer or at least a book-sadist. Nope, they have no resale value at all by the time I’m done. We commit for life in this library, baby.
I think Anne Fadiman explores this best in Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. She divides readers into two camps: those who treasure the book in its unmarked glory, and carefully try to maintain the illusion of untouched purity even while absorbing the text; and the second batch, the “carnal readers,” who…you know, make a mess of things and cheerfully go to hell entwined with their favorite passages. Little reverse Dantes, every single one of ‘em….us.
And yes, Anne Fadiman also highlights the “turned down pages” phenomena: she came across her father’s copy of (I think) Fanny Hill.
I will just conclude this cluster of observations by adding that the saddest thing to me is when a secondhand book isn’t marked at all. Because: it’s not actually about “judging” a book by its cover; it’s about giving it a chance, opening it, listening to it, even for a few pages. And that leaves marks, even careful ones. So it means no one has read them.
Sometimes, cheat codes be damned, you just have to take a chance. And bring along duct tape – because it just might be a good one.
Skeleton At The Feast 