Can you be a devoted reader and not care much about books as objects?

Lifehacker recently pointed to a post at Apartment Therapy from last year that offers five tips on caring for books, an earnest list of advice that runs from the patently sensible (“Don’t store books too close to a heater, in direct sunlight or in damp places where they could become mildewed”) to the fastidious (“To condition the spine…”). If you own valuable books, or simply prize your collection of paperbacks, the list is worth a look. I write if, because I realize that sometime in the past few years, I’ve gone from someone who cared for his shelves—organizing books by author and theme (if never alphabetically) and standing back from the clean rows with arms crossed in satisfaction—to an inattentive owner, as likely to re-shelve a book where it belongs, or even to find it a shelf, as I am to attend to other optional matters of household hygiene.

A quick rundown of the list reveals all my gross violations:

1. Take care of a book’s spine.

Sound advice. But after a hundred or so pages, a book starts getting unwieldy, especially in those one-handed reading situations (lying walrus-like on my side in bed, strap-hanging on the subway, eating pretzels) and pages start flopping closed. After a while, it takes real thumb strength to continue reading. That’s irritating. So I sometimes give the spine a good, hard crack, turning one unruly volume into two manageable mini-books. (Or in the case of epics, several cracks, and several volumes). Problem solved—in the short run at least. (Cut to my crippled Collected Whitman, and the missing pages from Cheever’s stories.)

2. “Always store books upright or flat, keeping similarly sized books together.” And, “Don’t pack books too tightly on the shelves…”

A shelf snapshot: a squat cookbook wedged next to a skinny Dover Thrift edition next to a tall collection of photographs. And these books are the lucky ones.

3. Keep books away from the heater and out of the sun.

I think of the tottering towers of sunbathing books that currently line my windowsill. At least they’re better off than their cousins living among the man-eating dust bunnies beneath the bed.

4. “When you dust your books…”

Umm… dusting?

5. “Handle books with clean, dry hands. Oils, perspiration, dirt and food residue can cause a lot of damage.”

“Oils, perspiration, dirt, and food” are probably the four words that best describe all of my habits, reading included. My greatest offenses in this area are the hardcover books, long ago robbed of their dustjackets, which feature my thumbprint stamped in the oily flavor of whatever snack I’d been enjoying at the time.

Librarians, rare-book collectors, mature adults—I deserve your scorn. As a child, I used to chew on my toys, leaving bite marks long past the age when such a thing could be explained. But there was a time, I swear, when I was careful with my books. What happened? Here are a couple thoughts:

Too many apartments; too many trips in and out of moving boxes. My books are the heaviest objects I’ve carried with me from domicile to domicile during this wandering decade, and are now less cherished than tolerated.

Galley copies, free books, unsolicited titles sent by publishers. A glut of books that I didn’t buy may have devalued the book for me as an object, and at the very least has crowded out the once favored old-guard of purchased copies.

Maybe I’ve grown lazy and am a candidate for reform. If so, these tips are a good place to start. (A good culling of the ranks might be in order, but I keep all these books thinking of better days, when I'll have shelves and shelves to fill.) Or perhaps I’m just no longer charmed by the book. In that case, I should heed the advice of so many of my friends and get an e-reader. Still, I suspect that though my Kindle, Nook, or Cranny (surely out soon from someone) would not suffer the indignity of bite marks, it would likely be dinged, scuffed, and scratched within days of being taken out of the box.

Photograph: net_efekt, Flickr CC.