The Beauty of Dog Ears; or, Why I Believe in Marking Books

I have a confession to make: most of my books are dog-eared, watermarked, spine-loosened, annotated messes.

Not my library books, of course. Those aren’t my personal property and therefore shouldn’t ever be changed in any permanent way. I’m talking about my own collection of paperbacks and hardbacks—some holdovers from early childhood, some acquired last week—which are jammed in every corner of our house. Books I’ve read and re-read and will read again, loving them with teeth.

This way of reading puts me at odds with many readers who are horrified by the idea of marking a book. And I get it. I really do! For anyone who loves books, the idea of intentionally blemishing them might seem like spitting in the face of their tremendous importance. Sacrilegious, even.

So why would I dog-ear? Why are so many of my book pages wrinkled with water? Why don’t I care more about preserving the spine? Why would I happily deface the page with my own thoughts?

Because I don’t think books are sacred objects.

Blazing hot take for an English professor, I know. But let me clarify. The ideas in books are what matters. The words, the text itself: that matters. But the material object? It’s a vehicle, a thing that conveys what’s sacred. And as our culture increasingly fetishizes print books—not for their ideas but for their aesthetic qualities—that emphasis on the material object has the dangerous potential to prioritize a love of books over a love of reading.

I don’t see any kind of intentional book-marking as damage. Instead, it’s expansion. Reading, for me, is an act of geography, a history chronicle, a conversation. When I dog-ear a book page and unfold it again later, I’m creating a narrative for myself: it’s a tangible archive of my reading, recalled through the ghost of that one-time fold. This is the place I once stopped; this is the place I started again. Re-reading books, I touch the old fold, sometimes. I think about the Carrie who made it.

Water-wrinkled book pages hold the memories of long baths, book precariously balanced on the tub’s lip. Any water-marked book of mine is a book I loved so much I couldn’t put it down, had to bring it into the tub with me because any separation felt like a sever. Sometimes the text is a little warped where my wet fingers turned the page, a reminder of a moment when I was so absorbed I didn’t think to dry my hand on a towel first.

The cracked and loosened spines of my older books aren’t just from placing them face down, although that’s been a sometimes-habit of mine, too. They’re from reading them over and over again, books so beloved that I can’t let them stay in the past. Some, by this point, have pages falling out, and I diligently press them back in, not ready to give up on our long-term relationship.

I write in books, too. More often in the ones I teach—which I hold up to my students during class, modeling the discussion I want them to have with the text—but also in the ones I read just for myself. (I won’t say “the ones I read for pleasure”; there’s so much pleasure in teaching!) It’s something I learned from my grandmother when I was a kid, pouring through the massive anthology of English literature she’d bought when she—a woman in her 70s— took community college classes. Next to two lines of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” she’d written, in her gorgeous sprawling cursive, “Nonsense!” I never knew if that was the professor’s interpretation, or my grandmother’s, but it taught me that reading was an active process I could have on the page. The author might be dead; the text never is.

I’ve said above that books aren’t sacred objects, but maybe that isn’t my truth after all. The books I own are sacred to me. They’re sacred, though, not for their perfection, or aesthetic qualities, but because my history with them is so undeniably visible, tangible. When I touch them, I touch who I used to be, who I am, who I’ll be the next time I open them up.

Loving isn’t a sterile act of preservation. We’re cornered and wrinkled and loosened by the people who matter to us. If our books are extensions of us, then we can—if we want—love them with teeth.