I like orange juice. I really like orange juice. But I sure don’t make a habit of learning about the properties of citric acid and optimal growth conditions for Tropicana Florida oranges. And I’m cool with that.
But I can’t apply the same to books. Not the ignorance about the production of such an item, but my complacency about it. I’m not talking about the words – I’m talking about the pulp. The sawn, milled, pulped, compressed, printed pages glued between embossed cardboard. That, my friends, is as far as I know about the physical shell protecting the tales I love.
Which is why I’m a reader, but not a bibliophile. See, I throw my old books on the ground. I bend their pages. I don’t dog-ear them (except, very occasionally, for the really crappy ARC when I need to remember a particularly excruciating turn of phrase), but I stretch the spines. And new books? I treat them carefully, but I don’t bend over backwards to keep them pristine. Just doesn’t happen.
