Literary Fears

I hate used books. At my poorest as a graduate student, when buying a six-pack of tall boys was splurging, I bent my will to the savings offered by previously read editions, but it was only out of financial desperation. Given my true druthers, I would only touch the fresh crisp pages of new publishing, would only smell the chemical airs escaping from shrink-wrapped volumes, and would only scan my eyes across pristine pages free of smudge, crumb, or dog-ear.

This, dare I admit, 'obsession' with new books certainly has no roots in my childhood. My mother is a librarian for god's sake - you can only imagine how much of my childhood was spent in a library, touching, reading, smelling, holding, loving library books. No Saturday errand run was complete without choosing a stack to check out and take home. My own personal after-school program was spending hours playing treasure hunt with the card catalog and no other place in the world offers more feelings of safety and love to me than my mom's library.

But yet, I can barely stomach touching used books. On the rare occassions in my adult life that I have frequented a library for the purposes of recreational fiction, my selections were based more heavily on which books were freshly carded and shelved than what was highly lauded. It's quite possible that my research endeavors were subconsciously shaped by this aversion to older volumes as well, rationalized in my head as an attempt to capture the most recent research on a topic. Perhaps I even would have been able to finish my PhD if I hadn't been so averse to spending extended time with the highlights and underlinings of strangers.

One might argue that used academic books offer not only financial savings, but also a built in cliff's notes of a sort since the important sections are already marked. One might argue this if one also does not assume that most everyone else in the world is an idiot. I never had any faith that the anonymous student before me offered any value with his or her highlighting, underlines, or notes. Perhaps used academic books should come with a description of the previous owner's class performance, so we could tell better if the A-student's notes are of value or if the C-student's highlights should be categorically ignored.

Not only do you have to ignore the previous readers' scribbles, but you have to add your own on top or around. Last year's slacker used a yellow highlighter, so now I must pull out the too vivid green one, the pepto-y pink one, or, worst of all, the neon blue one. Color chaos on the page! Yellow, blue, and then those necessary times when I must trace my blue highlight over yesteryear's yellow highlight and the basic laws of primary colors add green to my page. Yellow, blue, and green? It's just too much to take.

While the marks of strangers appall my senses, nothing delights me more than writing in my own books. Writing in MY books. Adding MY thoughts. Underlining MY quotes of value. Recording a living diary of how I experienced these pages, where my eyes rested longer, where my mind struggled out an interpretation that needed to be noted. A squiggly line under the words of greatest import, brackets around a bit that I don't quite understand, and the audacious exclamation point in the margin when I find the deepest meat of it all, when the author offers me the thought at the very root of all the words around it.

So here I digress into my love of books, a much more satisfying and fulfilling exploration perhaps than my fear of stranger's germs, but I must get back to my primary point. My primary point being, of course, that used books are icky. There may well be some law of nature that requires readers to hold either chocolate or peanut butter over the course of reading a new book. What else could explain the preponderance of smudgy fingerprints in library books? And why, oh god why, is it so hard for people to find bookmarks? Is there no scrap of paper in your home? No magazine laying about, no grocery store receipt? Please, I beg of you world, stop folding pages. If you are absolutely incapable of finding your place again at the beginning of Chapter Three, then you probably don't understand the plot anyway.

I have forced myself to explore this issue here today to try to understand why in my unemployed state I allowed myself to spend thirty dollars at Barnes and Noble today (throw in chastisement that I didn't spend this money at a locally-owned, independent bookseller) when there is a perfectly good library down the street. I can't even claim that I buy my own copies out of a desire to keep them for my own library. While of course I love having books around and covet my copies of Tolkein, Dumas, Shakespeare, an academic life long ago cured me of the need to keep every book.

I will just have to hope that when the savings account shrinks, my dear librarian mother who knowingly accepts these minor psychoses of mine will continue to aid and abet my love of new books.