Disrespecting Books

One of the things I do is, I rip up books. I used them to make paper beads or, in this case, paper resist patterns for glazing pottery.

Don't get me wrong: I respect books. And most of the time they pass through my hands unmolested. But I used to have an even greater respect for books; this was fifteen-plus years ago, before I went to work in a bookstore.

Let me tell you, there's nothing like handling hundreds of thousands of books to make you lose respect for books. One of my jobs, for example, was processing paperback returns. When they ship them out, they send the whole book. But when they take them back, it's too expensive to send the whole book, so my job was to rip off the covers and send those back. Most of the time, the coverless paperback book was tossed in a dumpster. (Some managers used to have the shipping and receiving crew hose down the books to keep people from stealing them out of the dumpster, but I never did that.)

So there it is. Get paid to rip up books and eventually you become a little desensitized.

The other night I was dismantling a book that I took off the free table in the biology department. It's called The Sexual Matrix and it's a piece of shit. I won't explain why it's a piece of shit, beyond saying that it's the kind of claptrap pseudoscience that one runs into from time to time in our largely scientifically illiterate society.

Here, for example, is the quality of figures in the book:

 

Fig. 2.1--Different types of male hair grooming patterns.

I'm sure you're itching for a closeup of some of these handsome gentlemen.



The Lothario



The Planet of the Ape Men



The Mr. Whipple



The Ted Bundy

And Dave says he's going to end up here:



The Male Pattern Baldness Special

Five copies of it had been sent to someone in the department for review. At least one of those copies had been taken out of commission. Be thankful.