Reading trash

I share a home with a bibliophile, and I adore Ereck's bibliophilia. A scholar of literature, he fills his shelves with gorgeous editions of books new and old, and there is nary a mass-market paperback among them. (I am able to call to mind one mass-market paperback he owns: Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones' stewardess expos� Coffee, Tea or Me?, but I fell in love with this book years ago and it somehow has ended up on my shelves. (Don't tell Ereck.))

I never was a bibliophile, in the sense of a person who treasures books not merely as conduits of information but as beautiful objects in their own right. Don't get me wrong: I love reading books. The house is full of them, and I regularly leave bookstores, thrift stores and libraries with armloads of the things. But while I do appreciate an attractive, well made, well preserved book, I'll happily read just about any book if it interests me, even a mass-market paperback with its cover ripped off.

The only books I can't read are those so deteriorated (crumbling bindings, loose pages) that they require extra physical effort to read; and underlined or--gag--highlighted books. I try never to underline books, and in graduate school I devised elaborate schemes of tiny Post-It notes, just to keep from underlining. And there's something about the sight of highlighter ink in books that just makes me want to close them.

How do you feel about reading mass-market paperbacks with missing covers?