Cut up your books
Whaaaaat!? Second blog post in and I’m already suggesting the destruction of literature? Oh me oh my.
Look, I want to get you on board with the most game-changing idea I can impart on you:
Your books, pamphlets, all matter of ephemera need not hold the form it arrived to you in.
First of all, many books are bound in a style called perfect bound. For those not in the know, there is nothing perfect about this style. The glued signatures and spine with no sewing to speak of leads to a book impossible to repair! These books, thumbed through even once, maintain no character nor rigidity. The work to repair one of these books is so tedious one would be better off re-printing the book and binding it from scratch.
If the manufacturer of a book does not care for it’s creation- neither should you. I bear no ill will to folks who take to a perfect bound paperback with rampant underlining, marginalia, highlighting- the works. If this is sacrilegious to you, you will hate what I say next.
Cut up your books. Take pages out, re-arrange them into ways that appeal to you, and re-bind it. Keep only what is of use to you. Perfect bound books are almost made for this- one would have to cut off the entire spine just to repair the book to archival standard, so I see no reason why one couldn’t re-bind the best of it.
The perfect victim, by the way, is coffee table books. They are picture heavy, mass produced, and frequently absolutely unwanted. You will find them for pennies in charity and thrift shops everywhere. Save them from a worse fate by taking their lovely images and re-binding them into book covers or other art projects.
Do you know what happens to unloved books? They go mouldy. They get foxing. They fall away from the spine, get waterlogged, burned, discarded… horrendous. Even donated books end up thrown away en masse. Believe me, I work to divert wasted books from second hand retailers and many of which (already in the trash!) were perfectly readable but dead stock. Don’t be afraid to make use of a book, in whichever way works for you.
The books that are absolutely worth saving (read: antique and specialist, rare if it can be fixed sympathetically) get snapped up by the frigid hands of middle-class DIYers. This I do not tolerate. There are home libraries brimming with aged books desperate for some TLC, but they will inevitably get inherited by someone who doesn’t understand the importance of preservation, and their words will be lost forever.
Many archival libraries will take a large blade to the spine of a book just to scan it en masse. This is brilliant- when we can disseminate the information from a rare book to the world, we retain a little more of our culture.
Here are a brief set of instructions on how to understand if your book “makes the cut”:
- Check feelings. Do you or a loved one have a lot of emotions attached to the book? Keep the book, and hire a bookbinder to repair it if necessary.
- Check prices on Abebooks and online. Does this book have listings? Decide if it should be sold.
- Check contents. Is the book of historical value to a niche audience? Decide if it should be sent to them.
- Check condition. Does the book have white or black mould? Is there water damage? Does the textblock of the book sit nice and tight to the spine of the book?
- Check priorities. Would you get more out of this book whole or in pieces? Do you have a creative practice that benefits from a healthy supply of scrap paper, or is this just going to create more waste?
If it has low social, historical and emotional value, choosing to cut it up really depends on your taste. Books, like most ephemera, will only last with careful, lifelong preservation. I wish I could say all printed media is worth the honour, but it is not. Look after your books and get the most out of them you can. It can always be rebound and returned to the shelf.
Careful with those knives folks,
Haley