Recently, I was reading a copy of the second book of Robert Aspin’s Myth-Adventures series. Trying to get something out of the oven, I put it down, then went off to watch a video. An hour later I came downstairs, only to realize I left the book on top of a defrosting paper box of frozen peas. Whoops. The cover looks fine, a few days later, but still…
People who read anything involving paper, what is the worst thing you have done to a piece of reading material, intentially or non?
I’ve used lots of books that weren’t worth keeping and had no resale or trade value as shuriken/throwing knife targets. Also, those boxes that copier paper comes in make excellent backstops for indoor airgun practice if you fill them with old phonebooks or paperbacks.
The paperback copy of Executioner’s Song was way too big to carry comfortably, so I tore it into three equal parts that each easily fit in my pocket. I guess I turned it into a trilogy 
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After discovering who L. Ron Hubbard was, I took his 10 volume Mission Earth series (in hardcover!) and ripped them to pieces and put them in a dumpster.
I dropped a book entirely into the bath once. It survived. I stopped getting books wet in the bath at around the age of 13.
We used to regularly take the required reading books for my Academic Decathlon team out and shred them with a 12 guage after the competition. Ditto a good friend’s law textbooks after he graduated from law school. Otherwise my sins usually extend no further than food smears on the pages and cat-gnawed corners.
I had a signed copy of “I Am the Cheese” that I left out in the rain.
Everyone of my cookbooks has some kind of herb, glass ring, flour and general schmutz on a goodly portion of it’s pages.
Any book I own, I dog-ear and basically use a coaster, so none of them are in great shape.
When I was a kid I bought a book that was pictures of animals having sex with funny captions (e.g. the caption on the elephant page was, “what the hell do you mean, ‘is it in yet?’”)
My dad threw it in the woodstove.
If a book I want to read is exceedingly long (think Michener), I scour the used book stores for the rattiest, most tattered paperback copy I can find. That way I don’t feel guilty about tearing out the pages as I go.
Uhhh, Trunk??? Good username for your post! That book would make a good game thread in MPSIMS, with Dopers suggesting species and captions.
Once I was taking a painfully theoretical graduate course in English. We were assigned to write some type of rhetorical analysis of a selection of scientific writing. When I got to class, it turned out the prof wanted us to turn in the selection we analyzed, as well as our paper, but (understandably) only wanted copies of the relevant chapter/article, not the whole book it came from. I had done a chapter out of B.F. Skinner Science and Human Behavior, a relic from my B.S. in Psych. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be reading Skinner again, so I ripped the chapter out of the book, right there in front of the class, and handed it to the professor.
FWIW, I was working full-time, stretched very thin in terms of time and money, and the class was getting on my last nerve.
When I was a CS prof, I’d get free review copies of books. Usually I’d keep them if they were relevant, or give them to someone in that field if they weren’t. But at least 2 books were “wished into the cornfield” that I can remember:
The text used in the first year CS course at MIT. What a horrible piece of trash. Total “MIT mentality” indoctrination. Trashed.
An upper division/grad book in my area. I read thru the chapter on my particular research interest. Horribly written. Couldn’t even produce a readable, let alone correct, specification of a famous problem. Multiple serious errors per page. Torn and trashed.
(I also loaned my favorite combinatorics book to a student. Came back stained with cat pee. While I was the one who threw it out, I considered it “no longer a book” at that point.)
I dropped a book or two in the bathtub, but the worst one was when I accidentally knocked a book into the toilet. 
The bathtub books were salvageable; the toilet book went into the garbage, after I fished it out with some tongs.
My brother left my Compleat Beatles and his autographed Peanuts book out in the rain. He survived my wrath, but only just.
I’d forgotten about this incident until just now. My daughter was about 5, and being a bibliophile, I read to her a lot and she understood that books should be taken care of, especially library books. One day she was driving me crazy, persisting in some annoying behavior and following me up the stairs. I had a book in my hand, a picture book from her school library, which I had meant to leave downstairs. At this point I was becoming angry and I frisbeed the book down to the carpeted landing (softly, I swear it!). The book flopped open and a page partially tore. She came absolutely unglued, as if I’d flayed her pet rat alive. Her eyes went huge and she sobbed and regarded me with such horror that I felt awful about it. It took a long time to calm her down, even after I’d repaired the tear, and it took her years to stop blaming me for this.
Wow. Now I’m really ashamed. Most of these sound like accidents. Here’s what I did.
My 15 year old daughter and I are both avid readers. We’d just left on a 4-hour bus trip, and she discovered she’d left her book on the bench at the bus station. I was about 100 pages into a paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice–one of my favoribe books. The thought of anyone going 4 hours without a book must have put me into shock. Because within seconds, I simply ripped my book apart and handed her the first 100 pages. I will never forget the shock on her face–and that of our fellow passengers.
But she did happily read away. During the trip I believe I ripped out 2 or 3 more 50 page increments. I don’t know how many–it’s blurred over the years–traumas are like that. Shudder.
I love books, really I do.
I still have the book parts here at home on the shelf with my other Jane Austen books.
I’m kind of anal retentive to begin with, and even more so when it comes to books: the worst I’ll do is put a bookplate in one, and maybe dog-ear a page or two (but I never leave them dog-eared). I’ve never spilled anything on a book, dropped a book anywhere, left a book anyplace unprotected, or used a book for anything other than reading. I’ve never ripped a book, and I don’t write in them – even textbooks.
I’m such an underachiever. 
The most I’ve ever done to a book of my own volition is drip soup on it, but when I was thirteen, my mother made me tear apart my paperback copy of The First Man in Rome because it was “vulgar.”
I once shot a book in Reno - just to watch it die.
Once, I spilled half a cup of tea over a brand new book. After I dried it off, I was actually almost glad I did it – the book’s still readable, and now it has “character”.
Yeeek! That’s scary. I hear Folsom Prison doesn’t have much of a library. I would not want to be in your shoes right now.
I once left my mother’s signed copy of Tea with the Black Dragon in a rainy parking lot. We spent some time with the hair dryer and it’s still readable, albeit brittle.
Like LaurAnge and N. Sane, bathtub. Numerous times.
Whaddaya mean, the bathtub isn’t meant to be an hour-long extravaganza of books, bonbons, and beautiful young men waving palm fronds?