2 September 2019
A physical book is good for much more than reading. In our house, we have several large art books propping up a movie projector. A thin paperback is wedged under a couch leg in a spot where our old floors are especially uneven. One summer we pressed wildflowers between the pages of a gigantic book about the Louvre, and later used it to flatten out a freshly purchased Radiohead poster. I am not the first person to choose a large, sturdy book as an impromptu cutting board: the cover of the Exeter Book, a tenth-century repository of Anglo-Saxon literature, bears knife marks from what looks like chopping. Stains on its ancient vellum suggest that, like the big atlas of Vermont in our living room, it was also possibly used as a drink coaster.
