A Book in Review – The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New

Book Count: 9

The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New By: Rosenberg and Marcowitz
Non-Fiction: books, hints, cleaning 182 pages 2002

We had three major problems with this book, one practical and two ideological. First the practical problem, most all of the information in this book is either common knowledge or things that you could pick up on your own with a little trial and error. The one good hint on book care that we have never heard and wouldn’t think about is how they got old books to smell better, which was using a solid air freshener in an air tight box with a few books around it. Now to the ideological problems: first, these people are dog people. The whole reason that they wrote this book is from what they learned selling books on dogs. We are cat people; we find all there “dogs are great” bits to be annoying and they have nothing to do with the subject. The second issue on our different prospective was that they look at books like collectors who see all books as collection worthy. We like to enjoy our books, and think they get a bit crazy at times. We would kick out of our house anyone that tried to shame us for not dusting, cleaning, and “properly” rotating our collection of old beaten up paperbacks that we got for $1 a bag at the church rummage sale already in that condition. They actually suggest shaming friends into taking care of all books they way they do. (We are amazed that they actually suggest that one can read a book, with the proper projection in the correct manner, of course.) We could see the good in offering to help fix books for our local library or getting them to make up a flyer or book mark on how to care for the libraries books; however, to be horrified that the library would rather sell one of their 20 (million) copies of “Harry Potter” then spend the time fixing it is just silly.