Heavy Books Update

I cut my books. Well, most of my books. Well, two. Two is most. Property will follow soon enough.

Everyone says to take your books to a copy shop to be cut and drilled, but I did the job myself with a carpet knife and a hole punch, acting on the same principal, I suppose, as a cowboy who shoots his own horse rather that letting someone else do it. I felt I owed it to the books. The result is ragged and unpretty, and very satisfying.

I was raised with a horror of marking books, let alone mutilating them, so I thought it would be a hard thing to do. But harder for me was writing notes on the pages; once I had jumped that hurdle, the cutting was easy, and actually rather interesting. The high cost of the books, I think, made it easier – maybe because I think of them more like tools than like books, or maybe because I feel that because they’re so unreasonably expensive, I’ve already paid my debt to them in full. Or maybe I’m still pissed at having to lay out seven hundred dollars for a single semester’s worth of textbooks.

And then, of course, there’s the certain knowledge that, just as I couldn’t buy any of my books used – because who wants to get caught out with the wrong page number just when the professor calls on you? not to mention having to translate every reading assignment to an old edition – so I’ll never be able to sell them for anything like what I paid. So they’re in pieces now, and much more useable that way, I must say. I may yet survive law school.