Joke Collection Website - News headlines - Do you want your bookmark, dog ears, or novel to remain open and face down while you read?

Do you want your bookmark, dog ears, or novel to remain open and face down while you read?

"Which do you prefer as a place for your reading, a bookmark, dog ears, or a novel open, face down?"

I must admit, my love for books Carnal, not courtly, a distinction Anne Fadiman explains in her classic essay "Never Do That to a Book":

There is more than one way to love a person, and there is more than one way to love books. The Maid believes in polite love. To her, the entity of a book is sacrosanct, its form and content inseparable.

Her role as a lover is that of platonic affection, a noble but doomed attempt to perpetuate the perfect state of chastity that has left the bookseller behind. The Fadimans believed in physical love. To us, the words of a book are sacred, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that holds it are just a container, and to treat them as roughly as desire and pragmatism dictates is a mistake. Not a blasphemy. Overuse is not a sign of disrespect, but of intimacy.

I may be a better fit for Fadiman's family than myself. My eldest sister was a former bookseller, a great reader, and a polite bibliophile. This is just one of her walls, and it's a true shrine to printed books as physical objects:

I love this! It's beautiful!

I don't think I've ever seen that before My sister bent the book or opened it face down. She used bookmarks - I know because when she was in high school she stupidly left her copy of I, Claudius, Half-Read on the couch downstairs, and I secretly had her bookmarked One chapter ahead of schedule!

She is a generous and tolerant soul, but I know she disapproves of my impure attitude toward my book. ?

I don’t want to disappoint her or my Quora friends. So to answer this question, I promise you that I will never bend someone else's book, or a book borrowed from the library.

This would be wrong.

Not to mention what I was doing alone at night, covered with a quilt, holding a pencil and a worn-out book of essays translated by Montaigne...