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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2942 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 23, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I like to imagine somewhere in the world is an avid reader who carries a 30x pocket magnifier in one pocket, and a small library of 1/30th-sized books in another pocket.

There are two kinds of book lovers: those who love the form, and those who love the substance. Back before electronic readers, I dated a guy who would buy a book to read on his flight, and tear out pages that he already read. To lessen his baggage load. Horrified this librarian we knew.

God, that's so wasteful. Perfectly good toilet paper getting thrown out before its time.

In all seriousness, as an inveterate dog-earer, I have no room to criticize anyone for their treatment of books.

I fold over the top corner to mark pages worth coming back to for quotes, references, etc. and the bottom corner to mark where I am. Half the people who see this think it's clever and half are appalled.

Years ago I talked about a movie called Wild which depicts a woman hiking the Pacific Crest Trail solo. (Don't watch it, it's trash.) One of the pieces of advice she receives from a fellow hiker is to burn her books after she's done reading them. When you're actually hiking a long distance, I imagine every pound counts; not so much when travelling by plane.

That being said, a lot of people have this odd reverence for physical books in general, wholly independent of their monetary or intellectual value, and a concomitant aversion to destroying them for any reason. It's an anachronistic holdover from a time when books were enormously expensive to produce and consequently to buy. When you've finished reading a disposable thriller novel (e.g. Dan Brown, Lee Child), the appropriate thing to do is to recycle it, the same way you would a newspaper. You are not "doing the right thing" by donating it to a charity/thrift shop: that just kicks the problem down the road when they inevitably recycle it three to six months later. (I used to volunteer in a charity shop: we never wanted for Dan Brown novels. We could have used copies of The Da Vinci Code for insulation.)

and tear out pages that he already read. To lessen his baggage load.

This feels performative in some strange way because at most it could save him the weight of a single book (because when he's done he doesn't have to tear any pages out, just give the book away whole), and most of the time he's only saving the weight of about 50% of pages in a single book. In that way it reminds me of people that slice books in half along the spine when they carry them to read on the NYC subway, also very performative.

I think it is attempting to signal what you said above, like an anti-fetishism, and signal a seriousness about the information within as opposed to the object itself. It also reminds me of the masculine fetishizing of optimization as a sort of ascetic ideal. Like you have hikers bragging about micro-optimizations, shaving grams off their pack weight, or bodybuilders eating nothing but plain boiled chicken. All these things strike me as equally performative for the vast majority of partakers.

Oh yeah, he definitely did it for the effect ripping out a book page had on others. Anti-fetishism, like you said. The effect only worked because most people get a bit of book fetishism drummed into them from an early age. Like, book burning is what totalitarian regimes do.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to get paper that's 1/30 of normal thickness. Some cursory searching indicates that normal paper weighs around 20 pounds per ream or 80 g/m2, and flimsy "onionskin" paper (often found in Bibles) weighs around 10 pounds or 40 grams, so ultra-thin 0.7-pound or 3-gram paper probably does not exist, and a book with 1/30 horizontal scale would have extremely unwieldy thickness.

(I feel like there's a condom joke to be made here somewhere.)

Does it have to be paper? Paper-like plastic could be doable (but perhaps would give also nasty not-paper cuts)

Someone more creative than I am, please make the condom joke that obviously is crying out to be made here!

An average book is about 300 pages. If the pages are kept the same size you could reduce the page count to just 30. But the form factor of most books is too wide to fit in a pocket, but if you reduced it by about 1/3 I think it would fit. Which would be a 90 page book.

Round up to 100 pages for some formatting, and white space needs. 100 pages of onion skin paper is about 0.2 inches thick.

Let's say anything beyond 0.6 inches of thickness in a pocket is uncomfortable. Cargo pants feature up to 8 pockets and this imaginary small book reader already doesn't care about looking like a total dweeb. A jacket could offer at least 4 additional pockets.

2 pockets for regular stuff, 10 pockets for books with each pocket fitting three books. 30 books on your person. And a neck chain for the 30x magnifier so it can always be close at hand.

@coffee_enjoyer still seems possible.

Edit: also a fanny pack is an option if the weather is too warm for a jacket or cargo pants. I found a fanny pack that is 6 inches from front to back, so that alone would be enough. If for some reason that is not enough you can always double up on fanny packs, one in the front and one in the back. Fanny packs also adhere to the fashion standards of this hypothetical reader/dweeb.

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