After DECADES spent obsessively hunting down vinyl records, and building his own LIBRARY of books-on-paper (imagine it!), the author fights back against the buzzkill that is the algorithm
I don’t collect first editions of books or “fine” (the bookseller’s term for expensive) volumes of any kind. Give me a cheap paperback with a sun-faded cover, one in which the pages are furry from use. This is because I treat my books the way the southern cookbook writer Edna Lewis treated collard greens: I put a hurting on them. I tend to write all over my books. I underline like a fiend. (Never use a highlighter, unless you are a thirteen-year-old girl.) I might even tear out the last blank page to compose a liquor-store list or a sarcastic note to the half wit whose parking job has pinned me in. It isn’t that I don’t respect books. It’s that I respect them too much to treat them like baby birds. Books are tools, not porcelain dolls. Use them or take them to the library sale.
This story is from the June/July 2017 edition of Esquire.
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This story is from the June/July 2017 edition of Esquire.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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