Thoughts on Copies
It probably won’t surprise you to know that I own a lot of books. It probably also won’t surprise you that my child is now at the age where she wants to pull all the books off the shelves.
What has surprised me, though, is that I don’t care. I’ve never really cared when my child makes messes, because they can be cleaned. But I also don’t really care to protect my books from her. I don’t really care if she destroys them when I’m not looking. (I’m also not going out of my way to get them destroyed, so I do take them away from her when I see, but I’m not particularly concerned about their fate if she does rip them to pieces before I can get to her.)
Other people seem very concerned about my books. I say my house is pretty baby proofed. They look at my books and give me knowing glares. But when I say baby proofed, I mean I’ve eliminated most things that could hurt her. The safety of the books wasn’t really a consideration.
Here’s the thing. If my books get destroyed, I will throw them out. Then I will have fewer books, and more space. And if I really care that much about a particular book, I can replace it for a few dollars. (The exception is the gaming books–I care about those, because we use them regularly and they are much more expensive to replace.)
And that’s got me thinking about the nature of copies. In book publishing, there is no original work, only copies of a thing. I value books; I value stories; I value information. But the individual copies that I own I don’t value beyond their cover price. So while it’s not like I’m handing my books over to be chewed on, I also am not going to be upset if the corners get soggy and the pages get ripped.
I’ve already read the stories. Now they’re just copies of words, taking up space. And copies of things are replaceable.
October 22nd, 2012 at 9:39 pm
I sort of feel the way you do about copies. From a rational standpoint I do–we have three bookshelves in our house, and my toddler has access to two of them. She takes out all the living room books every day and looks through them, and she’s definitely done a bit of damage to some of our books. Most of them I don’t mind–as you say, they’re just copies of words. And then there’s random ones that it makes me cringe when I realize that she’s bent a cover, and I can never predict which ones it will be. That said, I’ve left all the books still in the living room. I did end up removing all the middle grade books from her bedroom–for some reason she decided those books were just for ripping, and I don’t want to have to buy all new books when she gets older.
October 23rd, 2012 at 2:00 pm
I totally agree about the ripping. While I’m not worried about the random destruction of a book or two, I also wouldn’t want to provide a huge pile of books for imminent destruction, either.
I actually ended up getting some tension rods and installing them in some of the lower shelves, not because of destruction, but because I didn’t want to pick every book up millions of times a day. (Some of the bookshelves are at the foot of my computer, and it’s hard to work while my feet are being covered.) That seems to have worked for now–she really just wants to watch all the books fall to the floor and now that they don’t, they are less interesting.
I do have some books on higher shelves that I would be sad about losing. Mostly I just feel like maybe I have too many books, and having a reason to get rid of a few would be good for me.