Everything living on this planet is either prey or predator. There’s a natural order, like the lyrics of that old endless song about the old woman who swallowed a fly, in which larger creatures consume the smaller ones on each level.

Books are definitely prey. They don’t eat anything else, unless you count knowledge. Librarians capture them. Dictators ban them. Possibly the worst book predato is the library reader. They don’t even buy their own copies of the books to defile, they borrow the ones belonging to the local library and abuse those instead.

Yes I’ve been on book-repair duty today.

I’m going to leave aside my long-running hunt to find the person who makes red ink marks on our romance books (but in the words of a movie Mohican, “I will find them”)...

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