There’s one book which I’ve slowly been ‘editing’, as part of a long-term plan with a friend to use it as the basis of a musical work. I’ve so far torn out about two-thirds of the pages, and made deletions on many of the others. And this is in a copy I bought specifically for this purpose.
You still have a toilet?
I’ve never really taken special care of my books. Stuff seems to happen to them since I’ve so often got one in hand. I’ve spilled all kinds of food on them, dropped them in the bath, dropped them in puddles, and left them out in the rain. I’ve poked holes through them with pins (to smoke hash), torn out pages to wipe with (now I always carry tissue), and left them open, face down, for long periods. I’ve left them behind, traded them in, sold them, given them away, and kept borrowed copies. In short, I treasure them for what they give me, not for what they are.
My boyfriend in college threw “The Fountainhead” into the garbage…
Last week my tupperware of soup broke open in my bag on the way to work and soaked the book I was reading - a library book. I put it by the heater that night to dry it, and it did a reasonably good job, but the front few pages of the book were breaking away from the binding. So I glued them back the other day. Seems to be okay now; I renewed the book at the library over the weekend and the librarian didn’t freak out when she saw it, anyway. Still smells a little like potato soup, though, unfortunately.
We had just finished riding elevators, making it close to a lot, when we retreated to a coffee and granola type dive. Out front, among the usual assortment of apathetic homeless hippies who wanted a home and hippies who felt at home without a home, was a dumpster of biblical size, if they even had dumpsters back then. Supposedly, a local bar had recently went under. Owing to the lack of the human element in their business model, which leaned towards opening for only a few minutes a day sporadically throughout the week, they became sea cucumbers and digested their interior outside.
This outside was a dumpster, digesting the last throes of the careers of basically everyone involved. Mostly in this dumpster were books and hippies (hippies who by nature wanted the books) along with many other remanents of different terrible ideas gone equally terribly wrong.
Dumpster diving being highly competetive in an area of town run rampant with a low job prospect frame of mind, they dug feverishly in a typical lethargic hippie way at the last known reason for several different authors failed careers. In that dumpster lied all great aspects of the American dream, from the entreprenual gent with their physical, tangible goals to the inevitable classless faction who lived for taking their dreams away. Books, from comunism to cooking, were found and rejoiced over regardless of merit, purpose, or sanity.
One hippie, who was looking for nothing in particular but was rather specific regardless, walked upon rings of grime outlining his last several years of growth and tramua. They made sad, symbolic shoes for a sad, determined man.
We skimmed off a book from the top, and again retreated to relative isolation outside the presence of any parasites and the people who found being a societal syncophant a viable, lucrative career path.
Destruction ensued, with pleasant reverberation not far beyond.
Something was to be said either for the human condition or human faculties, or more likely our own human tendencies, when spooning out the flesh of pulppy, dripping words from the thick, spongey spine revealed in us tremendous satisfaction. Sinewy pages seperated apprehensively from the marrow laden skull, not entirely unlike a crow macerating the last throes of a crustaceans eye. With each pull was a struggle; with each struggle was elasticity too late.
We, as decomposers, needed as equally to tear down a crescendo of a producers self worth, just as equally as the consumers needed to subsist on everyone else.
Man, that was a fun day.
No, sorry, I simply don’t see why you are posting that comment here. Last time I checked, “The Fountainhead” was not the name of a book. It was the name of a piece of crap.
This thread, as far as I can tell, is not about treating pieces of crap just the way they need to be treated. 
On preview: Great story, Zebra.