Tuesday afternoon, slow at the archive, I was cataloging a donated pamphlet collection when I noticed I’d left a sticky note on my own desk from the night before that said, in my handwriting, “foxing p.34-40, spine cracked at ch.6, gift inscription front endpaper, keep.” That’s a condition report. That’s the exact language I use on actual nineteenth century material at work, and I had apparently applied it, unprompted, to a four dollar used paperback of a book I bought at a library sale two weekends ago.

I want to be annoyed about this and I can’t quite manage it. Five years in special collections and the habits just leak. At work I’m trained to notice everything a book’s physical body can tell you that the text can’t, who owned it, how many times it was actually opened versus displayed, whether that water stain happened before or after a specific rebinding. I catalog that information because someday it matters to a researcher I’ll never meet. At home, apparently, I catalog it because I can’t turn the noticing off, even for a paperback nobody’s going to research in a hundred years.

It shows up in how I buy books now too. I’ll pass over a reading copy in decent shape to dig for the specific printing with the cover I actually remember from childhood, the exact Del Rey edition with the art I have memorized rather than whatever’s currently on the shelf. Odette thinks this is a little unhinged, and to be fair she’s not wrong, she buys whatever copy’s cheapest and reads it in a weekend and doesn’t think about it again until she’s telling me the plot. I’ve started keeping the printing information in my reading log next to the title, a habit I picked up without meaning to and never dropped, because once you know a first edition dust jacket from a book club reprint you can’t unknow it and pretending otherwise felt dishonest.

Where it gets genuinely useful, weirdly, is board games. I catch myself doing the same inspection pass on a new box that I do on an accession at work, checking whether a card’s corner is soft from a print run issue versus actual wear, whether a board’s warp is humidity or just bad stock. It drove Marisol slightly crazy the first time she watched me flip through an entire deck before we’d even read the rules, checking for a batch of miscut cards before we committed an evening to learning something new. I told her it takes four minutes and saves you finding out mid-game that a third of your deck has the wrong backs. She still thinks it’s excessive. I think it’s just paying attention to the object in your hands instead of only the words printed on it, and once you’ve spent five years being paid to do exactly that, it’s hard to remember how to stop.