Daily Dose of Humanities

Submission by: Emily T.

I recently saw a post on twitter about a hotly debated issue where twitter user @alex_christofi asked: “Yesterday my colleague called me a ‘book murderer’ because I cut long books in half to make them more portable. Does anyone else do this? Is it just me?”. https://twitter.com/alex_christofi/status/1219564301029138432

I was first shocked that someone would ruin a book like this, but then I thought that this was actually quite practical. With larger books it can be cumbersome to carry around and splitting it in half would help with portability.

Not long after seeing this twitter post, I found that Constance Grady at Vox wrote an article tackling the exact conundrum pointed out by the above Twitter post. She discusses how and why we’ve come to romanticize the value of a book and whether or not we should. She concludes her article with the following thoughts:

With a codex, you can get interactive with the text. You can dog-ear the pages if you choose. You can scribble in the margins and underline and highlight. You can rip a codex in half so it’s easier to carry around and dip into during your commute. Or you can treat your books as decorative objects. You can organize them by color. You can build collages with their spines. You can rip out the pages and use them to paper your walls. If you want to make people really mad, you can rip a book into pieces and then organize the shreds by color. None of these choices are moral failings — and all of them mean that you’re taking full advantage of the enormous flexibility and power of the printed book. And maybe that’s a power worth romanticizing.

https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/1/21/21075327/book-murder-ripping-books-in-half-color-coding-shelves-spine-in-marie-kondo

To all the readers out there, what do you think about ripping a book in half like this? Would you ever do it?