Hateful Things

[orthent]

If I wrote a list of Hateful Things, in the style of Sei Shonagon, people who deface books would be somewhere near the top of the list.

The library at Moo U has a copy of Come Hither, an anthology of poetry for children assembled by Walter de la Mare in 1923, and I decided to revisit it; more than anything except The Princess and the Goblin, it

Comments

[indongcho]

Oh, I HATE people like that! I can't even stand it when books have bent spines, which is why I am determined to only ever buy or read something used if it's out of print.

So naturally, I'm very ashamed of the way I bent spines in my childhood. I'm rebuying all of my old books which have bents spines. The only good point I can think of is that I'm now getting the Atheneum editions of Tamora Pierce's first two series, which have prettier covers than the Simon Pulse editions...

Anyway. Can you find a used copy of it somewhere?
http://www.amazon.com/Come-Hither-Treasure-Walter-Mare/dp/0517027437/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-0419928-5066252?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191292462&sr=1-1
Is this the book you're talking about?

[orthent]

Yup, the very one. I'm amazed that you can buy a hardbound copy in good shape without spending an arm and a leg. And you can tell how middle-aged I am by the fact that I still haven't got used to thinking of Amazon.com as a first resort.

It's distressing when books get hurt, even by accident. I was rummaging around the other day in a pile of stuff, and one slithered out and fell to the floor with the front jacket bent in half. That's what I get for being cheap and buying a huge, heavy book in paperback...and for not keeping it in a safe place.

But defacing them on purpose...

[indongcho]

Good luck! I hope the book is in as good a copy as the seller says.

I always apologize to my books if I drop them. It must sound very odd to hear someone apologizing in two different languages to a book. But then, how should I know? It's normal for me!

[orthent]

Hee! you and Salman Rushdie! Somewhere--it may have been Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The Ravenous Muse--I ran into a snippet of an essay or memoir of his, in which Rushdie describes his family custom of kissing a piece of bread or a book if it fell on the ground, so that he "grew up kissing bread and books indiscriminately." Or something like that.

(I actually knew a few old-fashioned Greeks who would kiss a piece of bread if it fell on the floor and they had to throw it away--but that has more to do with the eucharistic significance of bread, I suspect.)

[indongcho]

The Princess and the Goblin sounds vaguely familiar. I may have read it as a child.

[orthent]

I loved it so much that every so often I check it out of the library to reread it, and because it starts on a rainy day--when the little princess, Irene, slips away from her nurse, gets lost exploring the castle, and comes across the twisting stair that leads to her grandmother's attic room--rainy days have always given me this strange feeling of possibility. And the part where the long-legged goblin cat jumps in at her window scared me silly.