Abcde BLOG

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted over at the Broke and the Bookish. Each week we get a different topic on which to make a bookish list. There are lots of participants and it's lots of fun. Check it out.


This week's theme is bookish pet peeves. I have chosen to interpret this as irritations over the physical objects of books rather than plot or character irritations. My list is in reverse order, and for the first time, I didn't make it to a full ten items.


8. Turned down corners--it just weakens the paper and if you've ever had a second hand book with high-acid paper, you know that the corners which have been turned down simply fall off


7. Foxed paper--I readily admit that this is just a purely aesthetic concern, but browned pages are icky.


6. Paperbacks that are not properly bound--This includes books that are not strongly glued to the spine or books whose first 15 pages are more or less stuck to the front cover.


5. High acid content paper--You just can't do anything with it after a few years. It spots and crumbles.


4. Teeny tiny print--I enjoy reading, but not if I get an eyestrain headache from it.


3. Text that is not straight on the page--pretty self explanatory.


2. No margins--I'm one of those people who write all over my books. I hold conversations with them; more so the scholarly books, but I can't stand it when there is not place to write notes.


1. When unscrupulous merchants and book dealers unbind valuable old manuscripts and early print books so that they can sell the pages separately. In my world, this is nearly a capital offense.