Anne Fadiman — who, by the way, wrote a tremendous book that’s part medicine, part mystery, and part anthropology — I highly recommend it if you like nonfiction at all — has opined that there are two kinds of book lovers: courtly and carnal.

Courtly book lovers would lay their cloaks across a puddle to keep covers and pages pristine. They would as soon crack their own spines as that of a book’s. They own drawerfuls of bookmarks (no dog-ears!) and they thrill at the turn of a crisp new page and the smell of a freshly printed tome. They revere their books. Maybe they have rituals around reading — a certain spot, a certain time of day, a certain flavor of tea scenting the air. They catalog and classify and covet particular editions, particular covers.

Carnal book lovers — well. They are in it for the stuff that lives within the covers and the pages, and they don’t mind ravaging their books to get at it. They read in the bath and half their books are rippled with the evidence of it. They crack the spine as soon as they pick up a new book because how else are you going to get it open wide enough to devour what’s inside? They fold pages and scribble on them and bend paperbacks to fit in a jeans-pocket. Maybe they even love the most battered books the most.

I am a carnal book lover.

This isn’t so much a problem for book-longevity these days, when I am surrounded by so many books and sources of books that I hardly ever read a title more than once or twice. But when I was a girl, especially a very little girl, and I didn’t make it to the library quite as often as I wanted to, and I didn’t have the funds to buy as many books as I wanted (three million), I re-read books a lot.

A lot.

And it shows. I have a few books that survived from those days. This is what one of them looks like.

I must have read that thing 50 times. (As you can see I wasn’t a movie-cover snob then, and I still don’t really care about it that much, although I do of course prefer a thoughtfully-designed book.)

Anyway, all this is to say that this week Sarah found out that my old copy of Momo (possibly the greatest children’s fantasy ever written, and coincidentally by the same author as that poor paperback up there, too) was a little the worse for wear, and she very kindly up and sent me one whose cover is still attached. Without even telling me she was going to!

I love people who send me books out of the blue. It is one of the nicest things a person can do, and I don’t mind telling you I got a little teary-eyed when I saw that was what was in the package. So now, of course, I’m re-reading Momo — which I also read so many times I practically knew it by heart — and it’s very like revisiting an old dream. I can feel synapses firing in my brain, a complex ballet that hasn’t been danced in 15 years or so. My neurons know the steps, though: “Isn’t Guido going to tell the story of the goldfish and the whale, in a minute? Doesn’t the man in grey visit the barber in this chapter? Ah. Ah, yes.”

I am pretty sure Sarah is a courtly book lover — many librarians are — but we can still be friends. I just won’t show her what my new copy of Momo looks like after it’s gone through a couple of reading cycles in my hands.

*(in the pre-1937 sense of the word)