To the Editor:
When I read the back-page Sketchbook “Dinner Companions” (March 8), I couldn’t believe my eyes. Surely Leanne Shapton wasn’t encouraging readers to eat while reading books — some of which could be from their public libraries! But indeed that is just what was happening. Before you leave your morsels behind, please consider those who read the books after you do. Several times, the unidentifiable gunky food of decades past has been so repulsive that I have returned a library book unread. If you are going to read while eating, and can’t be satisfied with a newspaper or magazine, please at least take along a piece of plastic wrap to protect the book!
Jan Moser
Flovilla, Ga.
Uh…I eat while reading all the time. (Gasp! Clutch the pearls!) I don’t think I’ve ever left any of my meal inside the book. But just in case, thanks to the editors of the Sunday Times Book Review for running this silly helpful reminder, which I suspect they chose as much for its inadvertent humor as for its service-y scolding.
I used to work at a high school library. I found several pop tart wrappers stuffed in books, bags of food from Jim’s Steakout wadded up on the shelves, gum on the book edges, and one empty condom wrapper.
The worst was the pop tart wrappers though. Well, and the condom wrapper, though I was pleased that the kids these days are having safe sex (just not in the library where I work, please, 14 year olds!) There were crumbs in it and they got all up in the book. And that brings bugs into the library. And the bugs that eat people food eventually start to eat paper and glue (starch and glucose). And that fucks the books up.
I eat all the time while I read too. I eat while I do everything, really. I’m hungry RIGHT NOW. But not with library books, please.
Reading and eating: two great tastes that taste great together! A little common sense (barbecue or red sauces? maybe not…) goes a long way. Methinks Jan has great life, if this is what gets her dander up.
There is a special nastiness about unknown dark blotches in a library book. Especially when they cause the pages to adhere to one other. *shudder*
Crumbs are less squicky, but still sorta gross when they are not your own crumbs.
@PhDork: Or you could do as Jan suggests and use a piece of plastic wrap as a book condom so none of your juices accidentally wind up in the book!
I work in a library and I haven’t really seen many *food* stains.. However, since it’s an art school, nearly every book comes back with at least a new paint or charcoal or graphite blotch. But hey, it’s colorful and doesn’t attract bugs!
I like collecting the weird things people use as bookmarks and then forget to take out when they return the book.
LOL! One of my lab mates in grad school used to eat Cheetos all the time. I could always tell if he’d borrowed my newspaper or journals because of the trademark orange grease stains;-)
I don’t think I’ve ever read a romance novel without a glass of wine, some chocolate or some cheese and meat nearby. I think I have got it down to an art – to snuggle in my comforter on the couch, with a wine glass in my right hand and the novel in my left, balancing the tapas plate on my chest and never getting a stain on the book. It is doable without always resorting to book condoms, methinks!
Meh. *shrug* I work in a library (1/2way through library school, woot!) and am completely ambivalent about this topic. If the book’s not autographed by Coretta Scott King or an ancient copy of the Malleus Maleficarum bound in human skin eat near it all you want, it’s not hurting anything. New books are so poorly made they aren’t going to be around long enough to get eaten by bugs, we have to mend our popular titles almost immediately. So, go ahead, crack the spines, dog-ear the pages, underline, read in the bathtub, whatever it takes to maximize your reading enjoyment.
And if the book is ancient or important, it should be in a vault somewhere anyway.
Also, eating near a book bound in human skin would be really gross.
For starters, library books, like money, are handled by a lot of people who may or may not practice proper hygiene, so… they are dirty with people-germs anyway.
hehehe “book condoms” awesome
Yes, the letter is a little silly, but hey, thanks for this:
(Gasp! Clutch the pearls!)
Hm. I read this as one of those tired, typical “Librarians are prissy bitches with no sense of real priorities!” remarks. We’re a bunch of pearl-clutching, shushing micromanagers who are just out to spoil everybody’s good time, right? Well hey, there’s no need to further stigmatize the intelligent, fiercely-pro-First Amendment, career-driven women who have worked for over a hundred years in this country to make good information available to all regardless of race, class, creed, age, or ability. We’ve already gotten enough shit for the hard work we do, and a great deal of it is because we are powerful, educated women who have command over a public space. We practically make Patriarchy’s collective balls shrivel up and die just by existing. We get enough crap already, believe me.
No, I don’t care if you eat while reading “my” library books, but I do care if you damage them, whether with food, rainwater, dog pee, ink, or anything else that renders useless an expensive item that we’ve taken the trouble to purchase, process, and make available to the entire public. Libraries are an important part of a civil society, and I do care when people do things that affect our ability to help the public.
And yes, I’m proud of being a librarian. I’m proud of my education, my drive to help others, my drive to preserve information and share it. I’m proud of the fact that I have to avoid wearing nice jewelry (no pearls, and no rings, either) because a real librarian gets her hands dirty. I’m proud of having go wear comfortable clothes I can move around in, because I am going to lift something over 20 pounds at least once during a shift, I will break a sweat, I will race from one end of the building to another–all for a patron who may, once I’ve finished helping her, turn around and make snotty remarks later about “those prissy librarians.”
Incidentally, despite what the “future librarian” above may say, a lot more goes into the cost of a library book than the replacement purchase price. Not having to replace damaged books means we can have bigger, more diverse collections. It means we can get an updated copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves while still satisfying the patrons who want copies of the newest romance novels. Maintaining the collection is an important part of what we do, and pearls and fainting have nothing to do with it.
@Laughingrat:
1. The author of this letter was not a librarian.
2. I was not making fun of librarians.
3. I regularly attend ALA conferences.