You must log in or # to comment.
As someone who would never, ever do this to one of my beloved collection: Go for it. Watever keeps you enjoying them. As others have said, we’re not talking hundred year old first edition hardcovers here. You can still tape them up and pass them on, unlike those philistines who take one on a hike and rip out the pages they’ve read to use for campfire tinder.
It’s the dlc
Part 1 and Part 2 of the first entry in the first four parts of an 18 part series.
Parts is parts
They’re gonna be damaged by simply reading them anyways. If they didn’t want the books damaged, they should come in smaller parts.
this is so wrong.
you’re supposed to cut them in half so you can fit each side in the pockets of your cargo shorts.
That’s why I cut mine in half through the middle of the cover; top and bottom halves. Sure, makes it a little harder to read, but worth it when I can fit each half in my pockets perfectly.
There’s no objective reason that this is wrong, but still, take that shit far far away from me
Doesn’t it fuck up the binding? Sure, a softback is still going to stay together in the immediate term, but the covers are almost always a single stronger piece, whereas the pages will now be free to work loose from the cut side.
So… I’d say it is objectively worse.
This is practically feasible, as books are made of a number of booklets called signatures, which are stitched or glued together at the spine. Until books became a mass-market item for middle-class consumption, they weren’t pre-bound: you (and by you, I mean a member of the gentry or aristocracy or an educational institution) would buy them as a set of signatures and employ a bookbinder to bind them together. If the book was thick, you could get it bound into several volumes for convenience.
Having said that, if you were doing this for practical reasons, rather than to troll, you’d rebind the books into new bindings (at least using a manila folder or something) so they’d survive until you’ve finished reading them.
How come the interior page I can see is blank?
I don’t get the reverence for copies of mass produced objects. I love music too but i don’t care if someone uses a marker to write their name on a vinyl jacket. (As long as it’s not a rare copy)
This doesn’t actually save much space, which is why I cut mine in half horizontally across the pages
last year I’ve allowed myself to do marginalia, to allow me to write notes and whatever I want on the books I read while I read. it’s inherently destructive, but it changes the whole experience. reading is no longer a passive activity but a conversation with the material. and I love it.
but felt guilty about doing irreversible changes to the book. then this shit shows up.
It’s destructive but it’s also constructive. That conversation with the material gives future owners new perspectives. At least in my opinion as someone who collects old subcultural texts. Notes in the margins adds to the experience of an old book
I have never been so offended by something so harmless in the greater scheme of things.
It’s a mass-produced book, and a paperback at that. You can certainly keep any such book in good condition to archive or re-read on your own terms. But that stack of acid-paper and cheap glue is going to eventually self-destruct. Unless it’s a limited production run, in danger of getting burned, autographed, is an actual collectable, or something else that makes it distinct or valuable, I say: go for it.
Source: I own a stack of these from back in the day. Despite my best efforts to store them appropriately, they’re all slowly rotting away. Some things just aren’t meant to last.
If you cut Infinite Jest in half, and half of infinity is infinity, is it now two Infinite Jests? Should every page in Infinite Jest be page ∞ since they’re all a division of infinity?
I don’t know smart math things so I’m just bs’ing here, please don’t tell me how wrong I am.
In all honesty, in no way sarcastically, I consider this a war crime.
