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TIL a guy at my laundromat judges books by how worn the spine is, and now I can't unsee it
I was folding towels at the Spin City on Maple last Tuesday and this older guy next to me saw the paperback sticking out of my bag and asked if he could look at it. He flipped it over, checked the spine, and said "this one's been read at least four times, that's a keeper." Turns out he's been trading books out of his garage for close to a decade and he swears the cracked spine tells you more than any review ever could. A book someone really loved gets soft at the corners and the glue goes loose, he says, while a book nobody finished stays stiff and clean. I brought him a stack of six paperbacks I was gonna donate anyway and he took all of them, even the ones with coffee stains. Now I'm second guessing every book on my shelf and wondering which ones are actually keepers. If you've got a busted old paperback you almost tossed, what's the one you'd never hand off?
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ray1363d ago
My whole shelf would fail that test, every spine on it is basically pristine because I buy books and then let them sit there judging ME instead. The guy would take one look at my collection and figure out I've finished maybe a third of them. The one paperback I actually wore out was a beat up copy of The Stand that I read on like six different buses, and the cover finally fell off in my backpack. My wife wanted to toss it and I hid it in a drawer like a raccoon with a treasure.
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