This space has already seen some discussion of “How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read,”  and 65% readers in the UK admit to lying about books they’ve never cracked.  The most cited unread titles are Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Joyce’s Ulysses, and The Bible.

Book re-gifting also seems to be a cross-cultural phenomenon, as 48% of UK respondents admitted to buying a book for someone else but reading it first themselves.  (This seems like a mostly victimless crime to me, unless the gift-giver is a frequent Cheetos-eater with manual hygiene issues.)

A shocking 62% of readers admitted to dog-earing pages rather than using a bookmark, which is a particularly unwelcome offense in the library world.

During my first week as a new employee in a large university library, I was asked by my supervisor and several co-workers if I had completed the mandatory training session known as “Murder in the Stacks.”  In the few days that passed before I attended this important training, I walked around the imposing seven-story building in mounting fear, as I noted the many poorly lit corridors and spooky basement book stacks that seemed to be excellent hiding places for the horde of deranged murderers I assumed were stalking library employees and students.

When I finally viewed the elaborately produced “Murder in the Stacks” VHS tape, featuring a cast of student actors in an ambitious knock-off of old Sherlock Holmes movies, the sense of anti-climax was profound.  The “Murders” promised by the lurid title referred to various crimes that could be committed by readers upon the library’s collection of precious and often rare materials, first among which was the despicable practice of dog-earing pages. 

After a lengthy discussion of the proper way to remove a book from a shelf (never, for the love of God, pull it down by the top of its spine!) and a tutorial on the proper use of bookmarks, I was forever shamed into reforming my own careless book-handling habits.

Jonathan Douglas, director of the UK’s National Literacy Trust, puts the relative hierarchy of book-handling crimes in perspective:

“I used to be a librarian and I can tell you books come back in the most horrendous condition. Turning down corners is better than surgical stockings hanging out of Tolstoy.”