Don’t get me wrong, seeing a perfectly preserved book with no cracks on the spine, no dents or scratches on the cover, pages without any tearing or fold marks is something extremely pleasing. And it’s totally understandable when we try to keep our books in pristine condition. We want to keep them looking brand-new so we can enjoy them for years to come and maybe one day share them with other people so they can love them too. But sometimes you’re reading, and you happen to have a pen on your hand, and you come across a line that you really like and oops! You underlined it. Or maybe you come across a passage that you really enjoyed or made you think about life and you want to mark the page so you can go back to it later, so… you dog-ear it.
These things can get book-lovers pretty heated, and we can think that dog-earing or writing on books is the worst thing that you can do to them; but, objectively, the worst thing you can do to a book is not read it…or burn it à la Fahrenheit 451. Dog-earing is not doing some irreparable damage to the book. It’s not even making it slightly unreadable. What it is doing is showing that you read it and that you thought something in it was important enough to fold a corner of a page. Underlining a couple of lines on a book and writing on the edges doesn’t take away any of the value it has; in fact, it shows the value that those words had for you. If you ever go back to that book you’ll be able to see everything that you were thinking about when reading it because it is right there on the page. There are thousands of copies of a book out there that look the exact same way, but the moment you add your own thing to your copy, it makes it unique and special.
Marking your books is not an act of disrespect or lack of care, it is an act of love. And you can choose to love your books in whatever way you want (keyword: your. Please do not write on books that are not yours!), whether that is by writing all over them or by keeping them in perfect condition. At the end of the day, books are just paper, and paper is easily destroyed and replaced. What really matters are the words and ideas inside of them and what they mean to you, and those are not damaged with a little bit of ink or paper folding.
If you’ve never tried it, I encourage you to take a pen to your current read. Write what you’re thinking on the edges and underline your favorite passages. If you’re nervous about it, do it with a pencil so you can erase it or write over a post-it. Dog-ear your pages. If you regret it, just unfold them and pretend it never happened. We won’t tell anyone.