So, as a child reading children’s books, I came across a lot of food and drink stains in the pages and other assorted debris.
I call them U.B.O’s, unidentified book objects
As an adult reading second hand books, things got a bit more savoury within the pages and I’m not talking about the authors viewpoint.
In this final part of The Joy of Books, I’d like to talk about hairgate.
I’ve had a couple of memorable instances regarding dubious looking hairs in books. When it happened the second time, it triggered me because it was almost an exact replica of the first time it happened, about twenty five years ago. The U.B.O’s both had a similar pattern of regularity with similar content.
I was reading a second hand book, of a sci fi genre, an omnibus, consisting of five books. It was a tome of a book and from the get go, quite frequently, between the pages, in the crease, was a long, thick, crinkly, wiry black hair. More hairs of exact colour and texture appeared throughout the book. I tried to ignore them at first and made sure that said hair did not slip out of the book onto my lap.
By the time I got to the third book in the omnibus, I was getting more and more repulsed but the hairs kept coming, and soon, after a bombardment of (what felt like) extreme porportions, I snapped, closed the book and slung it in the bin. Problem solved.
I didn’t want to put someone else through the same experience. I didn’t want to pass the book on as it was, yet, I also didn’t want to go through each page indvidually and somehow extract and dispose of said hairs because I was repulsed just by looking at them. Also, they were distracting. I was reading about iconic characters from a famous sci fi T.V series and all I can see are these hairs.
Had the book been in an orgy? What the hell had it been up to, to get so many hairs in it? My love for star Trek books wasn’t strong enough to endure the U.B.O’s.
I have had one other instance of this with an interlude of about 25 years. So, I think it’s quite an unusual occurence. I have read many second hand books, thus increasing the risk of more foreign objects inside, so the fact that I’ve only had two with a hair infestation is actually not that bad odds.
Illustration by Steve Young