Do you guys write in your books? Why not?

 

With the exception of my college years, I spent the first 60 years of my reading life treating books as if they were my first born children. I read them so carefully that, if they were bound correctly in the first place, they looked as nice when I finished them as they did when I first cracked them open. I think it all started when I attended a Catholic parochial school for my first seven years of schooling. Books truly were precious in our tiny school library, and the Dominican nuns in charge made sure that we all knew it. Books were equally precious in my childhood home, as I was really the only one who was much of a reader at all, and often used my entire weekly allowance to buy books for my own tiny library. 

I've been a book buyer my whole life and, believe me, as book prices rose higher and higher over the decades, I really had to juggle the budget sometimes in order to bring new books home. But I did it - and the cost alone ensured that I took great care not to ruin any of them, especially by writing anything in them, including my name. 

But then I discovered used-book bookstores, and that discovery made me realize just how common and over-printed most books really are. They are kind of like that new car you drive off the lot only to realize that you've just eaten a whole year's worth of depreciation before you even get to make the first payment on it. The minute a book leaves a bookstore, it loses most of its monetary value. That's just a fact of life unless you're shopping in a rare books bookstore.

I would still never write in the first edition of any book that gets a very limited first edition pressing. Some of those have potential to become collector's items, and I have many debuts on my shelves that have done exactly that. But any book that gets a first printing of 100,000 or so is fair game, as are most instructional books, history books, business titles, etc. Those are doomed never to have any resale value, and their real value comes from the knowledge inside them. 

So about ten years ago, I began writing notes to myself in certain books (beginning with, I admit, "sticky notes," so that I could retrieve the info when I needed it for some reason - or just wanted to check my memory against something I'd read in a different book. Soon enough, I took to highlighting certain passages just like I had done in college and making my own notes in the margins in ink (although I do use an erasable pen just to keep it neater). And now I can't imagine not doing it even to novels that become or almost become bestsellers. 

Now, it can all be taken to the extreme, the way a New York friend of mine took it there about fifteen years ago. She absolutely hated flashbacks so much that she would dismantle a book so that she could rearrange the chapters so that the two plot lines could be read separately. First she would read the flashback chapters, and then she would tackle the current day chapters. She had a bookshelf filled with books held together by rubber bands because she was a big fiction fan and the alternating-chapter construction is so common in modern fiction. It worked for her, so who was I to argue with her about ripping up brand new books?

Heck, I even remember a couple of times that she took to solving mysteries by building her own police-like crime board filled with sticky notes and strings showing the connections between various characters and events. I doubt that anyone other than the authors understood those mysteries better than her when she was done. That woman was a hoot, and I absolutely loved talking books with her before she "ghosted me" for a reason I've never figured out...maybe I needed to make my own "crime board" to figure out what happened.

Anyway...do you guys write in your books? If not, why do you think that is; I know that library books are off limits, etc. If you do write in them, when did you begin doing so, and was it something that evolved gradually over time as it did for me? Let me know how you feel about writing in your books.