A provocative post called "Lifehack Your Books: Dogear, Writing In Books, and Apologizing to Librarians" advocates writing in your books and dogearing the covers — hear, hear. I used to take enormous pains to ensure that my books remained in re-saleable condition, despite the fact that I never actually sold my old books. Now I scribble all over the margins, and in so doing, I turn my books into useful reference works, where I can open a page to a dogeared annotation and refer back to my notes, generated as I was reading:
The first taboo I think everyone should just plain get over is the taboo of writing in books. I write in most of my books. Notes about the content, things the content reminds me of, etc. When you just plain write in the margins, inside the cover, etc. there's no way the notes for that content will get lost. They'll forever be attached to the text they refer to.
The second is the folded over page corner (dogear). I know some of you just tuned me out as a heretic, but I dogear pages. Worse than that, I dogear for 2 different purposes. I use the top right corner of the right page as my bookmark. I also use the bottom corner of a page that contains something interesting as a marker as well. That lower dogear is often accompanied by notes written in the margin. By folding over the bottom corner of interesting pages, I can quickly look at a book of mine and see how useful I find it. It also lets me flip through a book I haven't used in a while and easily find the bits I'm likely to want to find again. For a particularly interesting book, like The Big Moo(Seth Godin), you can see the density of interesting material easily.
(via Beyond the Beyond)
