Novel crimes: which is worst

Jan 23, 2024

Queen Camilla has been revealed as a page-folder. But that's nothing compared with the punishments some people inflict on their paperbacks

Name: Dog-eared books.

Age: The German poet Andreas Gryphius mentioned a dog ear in a poem in the 17th century.

Appearance: Folded, bent, cracked spine …

Stop, I can't bear it. What kind of philistine dog-ears a book? The Queen, apparently.

What? This is why we have revolutions. Yes, it turns out Camilla is a corner-turner, according to the director of her charity the Queen's Reading Room. "I think she loves nothing more than being hit by that smell of a book when you open the cover," Vicki Perrin told OK! magazine. "The feel of the pages and folding the corner down for the next time."

She's a monster. Come on, it shows she loves books!

That's no way to treat something you love. People are so precious about books: they are just paper and glue. It's a 3-for-2 stickered Richard Osman paperback, not a holy relic to be handled with white gloves.

I will concede dog ears are only a mid-level misdemeanour in the hierarchy of book crime. Go on, take me through it, book police.

The lowest-tariff offence is reading in the bath. Very much a soggy crime of passion, yes.

Next worst: using a book as a coaster or a fly swat. It's bluebottle season, what am I supposed to do? Anyway, what's next?

Spine-cracking and dog-earing. I disagree: a flattened spine or a dog ear is like a love bite for a book.

Revolting. More heinous still, though, is underlining or making margin notes. But marginalia has a rich literary history: Coleridge, Blake, Darwin, Newton and Voltaire were all famous margin scribblers. If Jane Austen did it, it can't be wrong, surely?

There's a difference between Fermat teasing his last theorem in a margin and Dave, who checked out Sally Rooney from the library before you, underlining the sexy bits in red Bic. That reminds me of the battered school copy of Judy Blume's Forever that always fell open at the sex scenes. A more innocent time. Speaking of innocence, which is the worst book crime?

Cutting a book in half because it's "too heavy" . Jail for 1,000 years. Right. And where do you stand on cheese?

Cheese? I see you’re not familiar with what people use as bookmarks in library books.

I’m not going to like this, am I? No.

Go on , I’m holding my emotional support Hilary Mantel first edition. Well, the librarians of Twitter have reported cheese slices, a banana skin, a circular sawblade, a gnawed chicken leg and a lock of hair. A little fold doesn't seem so bad now, does it?

Do say: "To revisit a dog-eared book is to experience a gentle literary haunting."

Don't say: "I read on Kindle."