The love of a printed book

There is nothing better than buying the most recent book in a series to fill the bookshelf. At first you love their freshness, the pristine quality, you feel like you are the first one to read this new adventure, you worry about it getting damaged blah blah blah. But just as much i love my old books that show signs of reading more than once. Some of my books are so old, found for a couple of dollars in a secondhand store, that you just don't worry about keeping them clean and undamaged, coz they are, well, already damaged. My favourite (well one of since nothing will beat the amazingness which is harry potter) series is the Tomorrow series. For those of you who have stumbled across this blog who don't know what i am talking about, it is an australian series kind of like Red Dawn, but australian. There are many reasons why these are my favourite in my accumulation of books sitting proudly on my bookshelf. One is because as soon as i read the first book i couldn't put them down. Another is because they are the perfect size. A long adventure, broken up into seven books plus a follow on series broken into three, just the perfect size to take when you travel. The other is that it looks the the strangest group of books. I told my grandmother about them and she found some of them at the secondhand bookshelf. Because the book has been reprinted a ridiculous amount of times, each cover is different, their covers bent and torn from the love of their previous owners. So most of the books look dishevelled, but loved (kinda like people in movies after sex), and i love them. They are at the point where i don't feel bad about writing my own annotations in them, or leaving them lying around on my floor to be stepped on. Its funny because i don't feel that way about the old secondhand books i had to read for school (though i quite enjoyed it when the previous owner left annotations for me), but i suppose you have to love the story to love an old cover. I think it is true that we read a book by its cover, and thats why we all like buying books new, looking more fresh and appealing. But once you're past the cover and are hooked on the storyline there is no putting it down, and you can't stop raving about it to people who really care, and even though you know you are alienating them by referring to them all the time, you just cant stop yourself. Same goes with movies and video games and (other). The thing is you want more and more, and unless your ready to wade through pitiful fan-fiction there really is nothing else to do but talk about it and read it over and over again, annotation your thoughts on the old crumpled pages..........