I was moping through some blogs and stopped by Jodiverse. She has an interesting entry on library books, musing on what disgusting things may have been done to them by previous borrowers. It reminded me of some vile encounters I've had with soiled library materials.

Once I saw a William Saroyan book I wanted to check out. I took it down from the shelf and immediately noticed some jackass had deposited his gum in the pages. (I wrote "him" because it just had to have been a guy.) I could never bring myself to check the book out even though I thought about it several times. Years later I found the very volume at the local Salvation Army, gum still in place. I thought of buying it and carefully removing the gum, but I just couldn't make myself do it.

Another time, at my school library, I checked out a copy of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, because I wanted to hear Dylan and the Band do "The Mighty Quinn". I pulled the record out the sleeve (this was at the tail-end of the vinyl days) and there were dried boogers embedded in the grooves of the very song I wanted to hear. And, believe it or not, as squeamish as I am, I cleaned the record because I wanted to hear the song that badly. It was actually worth it. This wasn't my only run it with dried mucus at libraries either.

A year or two later I checked out Kenneth Tynan's Show People (I wanted to read the chapter on Louise Brooks), and a couple of the pages were stuck together with dried snot. I fought against mounting repulsion so I could read that chapter. Years later I bought a copy of the book at a library sale. It seems to be snot-free, thankfully. But on those rare occasions I take this book down from my overloaded shelves, I wash my hands when I'm finished with it.