Okay, so, I'm in the Borders at the mall yesterday waiting for Rod. We were supposed to meet up by Best Buy so that he could return his birthday present, which was not good enough for him (sob). He was late, so I was browsing.
I was in the Stephen King section, a place I have not been in some time. I used to jump on all things King as they came out, but I haven't been in a horror kind of mood, reading-wise, in an age. I realized that I had yet to actually look at the reissued Gunslinger, which came out months ago. King reissued it in preparation for the next volume in the Dark Tower series coming out, and it has thirty new pages and a new intro and all that good stuff. So I grabbed one of the two copies off the shelf and opened up to the foreward to have a little read.
And there I found the true horror.
Someone had begun reading the book. In the bookstore. And had dogeared a page.
WHO DOES THAT??? In a bookstore?? In all seriousness, who does that?
This was clearly not a mistake; it had been carefully folded over and creased so that there was no way it could have happened by accident. Now, I don't even dogear books in my home. I also try not to leave books lying upside-down, so as not to break the book bindings. I close books, whether I have a bookmark or not. If I don't have one and I forget the page number, well then I just muddle through and search to find where I left off.
But if you are the dogearing type, if that's what you do, fine. I don't judge. Just, do it in the privacy of your own home! Don't borrow my books and do it to them. And for the love of god, let someone else get them home and enjoy them before you dogear them. The books in the bookstore aren't even YOURS yet. Leave 'em alone.
Oh. And don't dogear library books either. Evil dogearers.
Not that I'm judging, mind you.
Once, when I was a kid, my mother wanted me to get to sleep, so she took a book out of my hands and tried to dogear the page I was on. I grabbed at the book, desperate to prevent this act of vandalism (I may have made a cry of protest, too). I didn't get a good enough grip, so my effort to preserve the book ended up tearing part of the cover off.
Why yes, that is my face next to the word "counterproductive" in the dictionary.
In a bookstore? That's crazy, who even has time to sit and read in a bookstore? I have been guilty of leaving the book upside down once or twice though. But only with books I own.