Book Police

Meet my conscience. He is the first one to greet me when I come home from a book hunt to check out my acquisitions and approve each one for my use. Some he rescues from my "murderous clutches" to take up permanent residence on his bookshelf. (He has quite a nice vintage book collection, himself.) The one he's holding is actually a first edition Tolstoy. Unfortunately, in a moment of irrevocable decisiveness, my sister in Dallas dissected this one in Texas before sending it my way. Even though it's just a shell, my son was so offended by its destruction that he would not allow it to be made into a journal. The corpse sits appropriately alongside his Edgar Allen Poe collection.

For the record, I have great respect for the old books I recycle into journals. I feel that I provide a dignified end to their usefulness in life. Each of them has inevitably been discarded by a previous owner to end up on the shelves of a thrift store or antique mall. I bring them home, carefully deconstruct them, fashion beautiful marbled paper to coordinate with their covers and give them new life as a journal that someone will trust with their reflections and memories. Surely they will end up as a personal treasure to their new owner, and perhaps even for those that come after them. My sisters and I love thumbing through my mother's old journals. It's like hearing her voice again after many years of missing her.

So it's not murder. It's Extreme Makeover Book Edition.