My parents bought a Harry Potter book box set for my older sister when we were in second grade, and since then each of those books has been read front to back at least a cumulative 10 times by my family. The first three books had around 200-300 pages, which wasn’t unreasonable for me at the time I read it, though the fourth, the Goblet of Fire, was a daunting 636. It took me the longest to read out of all the books, but I loved it the most, and you can certainly tell from our copy’s battered state. First of all, the frayed cardboard cover of the book is visible through the corners, and the cloth spine is pilled, stretched and caked in dust. The pages themselves have held up only half decently: there aren’t a lot of tears, though the first 30 or so pages have some water damage, and most every page has been dogeared, had their bottom corners bent upwards, and have a crease near the spine where my sisters or I would fold them into place. Yet the most noticeable wear and tear is that a few sections of the book have fallen out completely, and the footband of the book has come unstuck from the spine, revealing more flimsy cardboard and brittle chunks of dry glue, the first 250-something pages of the book only hanging on by the front cover.
Our copy is somewhat inhibiting to read, and it has to be handled gently to keep the pages from falling out, making it impossible to quickly hide it under the covers when reading with a flashlight past your bedtime. I can’t remember when exactly the book got to be in this sorry state, though it would be somewhere between 6 and 8 years ago. I’ve reread the entire series around 5 or 6 times, and each time I briefly consider purchasing another copy when I reach book 4, until the thought is dispelled by nostalgia. Plus, on recent rereads of The Goblet of Fire, when I reached page 245, I could just put the severed chunk I was reading from in my bag rather than toting around a heavy book. Convenient!
A lot of my favourite books have fallen apart like this. Possibly my favourite is an old trade paperback of The Fellowship of the Ring from the '70s which was my mom's first copy, then mine, and is likewise in sections, with layers of 40 years' worth of tape.
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