Conflicted

No, I'm not conflicted about abandoning this blog, I've just been busy with the new job and all.

And for those of you who haven't heard, I got a new job. I'm working as an editor for an educational publishing company, and so far it's pretty sweet.

What I was conflicted about earlier today was a task I had to do for part of my job: I had to pull a book apart. Yeah, it was weird. See, whenever we print a new edition or a new printing of a book, we digitally archive the previous printing, from what I can tell, it's pretty standard operating procedure, and it's good because you can almost immediately pull up any edition of any book to see what changes have taken place and all that. It's just the method by which that archiving takes place that was a tough pill for me to swallow.

For those of you who regularly use a multi-purpose copier/scanner deal, you know there is the glass platen where you can place things, and there is a top-loader that will pull loose pages through and scan them automatically in a large batch. That is clearly the more efficient way to go about scanning high page counts. So today I had to take a reference copy of this book, cut its cover off with an old-fashioned paper cutter, and then pull each individual page from the binding to create individual pages to feed into the top loader, and for a book nerd like yours truly, that is just about the same as doing something cruel like pulling the wings off of a fly.

It got me thinking of how peculiar I assume I must be. I'd imagine most of you reading this wouldn't think twice, but it really got to me. I talked to the book, said how proud we all were of it, and assured it that it we were going to send it to a nice farm upstate where it could play in a big field with other retired editions so that it wasn't worried to take that final trek. I reassured myself that this book was giving its life as a bound edition to assure future generations of better books, but it still was tough. Outside of humans, cars, or domesticated animals, this is probably about as sentimental as I get about stuff like that. I can go to a restaurant and eat veal or foie gras without batting an eye. I enjoy watching chefs artfully butcher and prepare meats, but somehow if it happens to a book, I get all glassy-eyed and have to steel my nerves.

I had a similar reaction with a piece of art that I purchased a few years ago. It should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever read this blog that I am a huge fan of Jack Kerouac, and when I saw a portrait that an artist had painted of him for sale at a local restaurant, I bought it right off the wall and carried it home with me that night. However, there was one little part of that portrait that still makes me a little sad to this day: the entire backdrop of the portrait is made up of ripped up pages of On the Road that were decoupaged onto the canvas. It looks great, and it makes an excellent effect, but it also makes me a little sad to know that a copy of my favorite novel of all time was sacrificed for the sake of art.

In summation, I'm odd and you should love and cherish your books like I do. Now I'm off to bed to cuddle with a couple books and assure them that they'll never see a fate like that as long as I have a say in the matter.