The well-loved book

My first work-study job in as a freshman in college was at the school library.  I worked at the front desk checking out books.  As work-study jobs go, I could have done a lot worse.  It was 1987, and we still used a paper system to loan books.  I’d ask for my fellow students’ ID, stamp dates on cards in the book pockets, and file the cards.  Sometimes I pushed a cart around the beautiful, Gothic building, and picked up books to be re-shelved.

Once the librarian knew me well enough to trust my dexterity with the Dewey Decimal System, she even allowed me to shelve stray books where they belonged.  Little did she know I had won the coveted “library skills” prize in my eighth grade English class!  (Actually, she probably did know.  And I’m kidding about the “coveted” part too.  I was a chatterbox and eager to prove myself.  Ever since that debacle in junior high, when I had borrowed too many books from my hometown library and submitted to a “talking to” by the head librarian in exchange for a reduced fine, I wanted to prove myself worthy to the mythic, archetypal librarian.)

One of my favorite off-hours work was repairing books.  Before working in a library, I didn’t realize that books sometimes fell apart, their covers ripping or the binding becoming unreliably loose.  I treated my own books, and any books I borrowed from the library, well.  Now that I was in college, some of the most well-worn books from the long lists of required and suggested reading on our course syllabi were on heavy rotation, particularly around midterms and finals.

I was apprehensive when the librarian first showed me how to fix a book.  (I was never handling any rare books, just paperbacks and musty secondary source volumes from the 1940s and 1950s — analyses of the Franco-Prussian War, Queen Victoria, the history of Judaism, and arcana on all liberal arts subjects.)  Most repairs, she explained, could be done with clear tape.  She whipped out a roll of packing tape, eyeballed the distance from the top margin to the bottom of a yellowing hardcover, and carefully lay half of the tape the long way along the inside cover.  She squeezed the craggy, torn binding close to the front page, and pressed the other half of the tape along the front page.  Later she showed me her method of repairing a paperback.  She just repeated her handiwork along the edge of the outside cover.

It was so simple, but once I learned how to do it, it reminded me of crocheting or knitting — satisfying, slightly physical, and precise, the way fussy kids who enjoy working in a library like their busywork.  These days I’m a compulsive fixer of the books my kids borrow from their teachers.  The book pictured, MATILDA by Roald Dahl, has come home in my daughter’s backpack at least twice this year.  She loves it and can’t believe that I still haven’t read it.  (She knows I loved CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY and JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH when I was a kid.)  And at nine years old, she’s already re-reading her favorite books.

I’ve also repaired large-scale illustrated books on the finer points of Star Wars and the intricacies of Harry Potter.  And my kids seem to think it’s both bizarre and awesome that I know how to fix books.