How To Safely Open the Spine of a Book Without Breaking It
I’m a firm believer of treating my books with reverence—I want them to last since I’m a frequent rereader. I strongly dislike dogeared, broken backed, mangled, & otherwise “slightly” damaged books. They’re uncomfortable to read because of the strange hand contortions I have to employ to read them. My mom, who I most frequently share books with, has none of these hangups. She bends the cover all the way back, she leaves kleenex in random pages for use or bookmarks (I can’t tell), she leaves them lying open with stacks of heavy stuff on top…you name it, she does it.
My frustration came to a head when reading the mass market paperback copies of Rober Jordan’s Wheel of Time series for the first time back in Jr High. They are terribly made books that are giant & use the worst spine glue I’ve ever met. When you add my mom’s abuse in the mix, it is a bad scene indeed. My original copies are mostly in 2 to 4 parts. This happened when the spine of the second book broke & we were reading it at the same time. It was MY book, so I got first dibs on it. But I read too slow for her, so she just ripped it in half (to be honest, it was already in half) & we could both read at our leisure. At the time it was a brilliant solution. And the next couple of books followed suit without subterfuge on her part. When the spines broke, she just ripped it into more manageable pieces.
The problem arose when I tried to reread the series in preparation for the next book release. I didn’t have 4 books to read, I had 6-7 parts of books to locate & figure out how to piece together!
A solution to this problem didn’t present itself until around the 8th book & many many years later. I needed to pre-break the spines in a way that wouldn’t ruin the book. Kind of like breaking in your shoes before going on a serious hike. I now use this method on all my books that are just way too effing big to be a comfortable mm pb. (think Jordan, GRRMartin, Stephanie Meyer, King)
PRE-BREAKING A SPINE (Note: do not do this if the book is frozen. Not really a problem for most people, but when a delivered book has been sitting in my porch all day during winter in ND, the spine glue freezes & cracks easily. Just sayin.) I page through the book backwards. I open the book with force & smooth it open till the spine feels some action, maybe popping slightly, about every 5 to 20 pages. —If it’s a really crappy book like the Jordan mms I tediously open every 5 pages. GRRM’s mms are made a bit better & I just do this to keep the book from getting that awkward shelf lean feature where the book is kind of sideways when you hold it.
And that’s it. I break the spine backwards. Then the action of holding it open the other way page by page doesn’t hit the book quite so hard. It has saved the quality of many a book through the years. And none of my Jordan books have fallen apart since.
Pretty simple really, but with giant books like Stephen King’s It or The Stand it can get tedious.
Hope this helps!
1 year ago • Notes