How to Wear a Book in Three Easy Steps

1. Wash it. 

When I say Wash it, I mean Put it in the Washing Machine. This is a rather large, hardcover book. With a bold bright red stripe on the cover. I checked this book out from the library. Needless to say, it is not something that should ever be thrown in the washing machine.

But I'd been multi-tasking. Tossing items on top of the dirty clothes in the laundry basket. Things that belong downstairs that have meandered their way upstairs. A pair of sneakers for the walk I planned to take later. My laptop. Oh, and the library book I'd been meaning to finish up. 

I checked it out a while ago, before the pandemic, a recommendation from my son. It's a book of essays and I've read half of them, but over time the book ended up lower and lower in the stack of books beside my bed. The library where I work has this great policy where we automatically renew books that have been checked out, up to ten times, as long as no other patron has requested them. Usually we have a 28 day borrowing period, but because of Covid, we've doubled that time. 

What I'm saying is that I've had this book out since February 2020 and it was looking like it was nearing the end of its renewals. 

Thus, my decision to read it, flinging it on top of the laundry basket before heading downstairs. 

It gets a little fuzzy at this point. I know I took the laptop out of the basket and the sneakers. I did the wash. I took a walk. I wrote for a bit. 

I don't know if I can adequately capture what the inside of the washing machine looked like when I opened the door later. So, I will show you a picture:

*note the pink tinge

I honestly didn't know what I was even looking at. Something had exploded? A box of red tissues? I pawed around inside the washing machine drum and found

a clue:

A library book barcode. A plastic cover. What was left of the spine of a book. The rest was the consistency of what I would guess you'd call "wood pulp." The book had apparently gone back to its natural state. To say I was sick about this-- A book!! A library book!! How will I clean this mess??!!-- is a massive understatement. 

Anyway, number 2. Clean up the mess. 

This begins with picking chunks of mushy paper out of the clothing and the holey drum of the washing machine. There's a vacuum cleaner involved. Several more wash cycles. The dryer and the vacuuming out of the dryer. Shaking individual items of clothing out in the back yard, slamming some pieces on the fence to shake loose the bits and chunks of paper. Cleaning out pockets and other crevices. 

What can't be cleaned: the damage caused by the red dye from the book cover. Now, all of my husband's underwear and T-shirts are tinged pink. And my pair of pants, the light gray ones, are a pinkish-gray, with a new random bright pink dot design. 
 

3. I wear them to work the next day, realizing as I settle up my account (the book is a reasonably priced $28.95) that I am wearing, in a sense, a book. 

I plop a bag of collected book pulp material on my circ manager's desk. In her many years working at the library she has seen everything that can happen to a book 

except this.