RL Stine

In the law school library where I work it happens every five years or so. Usually they just tear out crucial pages, saving the trouble of copying and depriving competitors of the information. You can pretty much predict what kind of lawyers they will turn out to be.

<i>students who mutilate books so that other students can't use them to study for the same test. </i> Is that really a thing?

Dean Reilly

*whispers* Someday I shall travel in time and meet <i>it</i> face to face.

William Burns

I just noticed Claire is nowhere near maximum floof. I predict that will change...

BobC

My best friend (Ook!) is a librarian (Ook) and this has taught me to respect books, to NOT wear them out by reading them, that bananas will get you ANYWHERE, and to NEVER, EVER use the "M" word. OOK!

My Mom was a librarian for 40 years. So it's not that I <i>had to</i> make a show of respecting library property. She instilled in us that respect. And because we had to help shelve books, fill out cards for the card file, and other such tasks, we also gained a greater contempt for people who <i>didn't</i> have respect for the library.

awgiedawgie

Personally my mom works at the library so I always have to make a big show of respecting library property lest word get around that she raised a rude boy.

Mitchell Sealy

If you expel them first, technically they aren't students any more...

Captain Button

Someday he get promoted and sent out to recover lost books, and guess what his first assignment is?

Captain Button

Yeah, the way I pronounce "teh" rhymes with "meh" and not "me."

Stavros Karatsoridis

Several of my associates in high school asserted they could never go back to the library, because they'd checked out a book and hadn't returned it for so long the late fee would be more than twice the cost of buying the book new. I tried to tell them it didn't work that way, but...

Some Ed

I know the feeling. I used to avoid the street the public library was on, lest a librarian throw open a window and yell "You there! Where is our book?" We know where the book is. We are storing it at your house. If we need it for another patron, we will send you a polite passive-aggressive email. We reserve our ill feelings, our black, bitter, and poisonous ill feelings, for book thieves, people who cut illustrations and maps out of books, and students who mutilate books so that other students can't use them to study for the same test.

I think it probably triggers the same response we have to having lost a friend’s possession. We view the library as a valued entity in our lives, and losing a book feels like a violation of the relationship, leading us to fear that we’ve “hurt” someone close to us.

it would also depend on how you pronounce "shirt"

Eir W

Ermahgerd!

Trigon Manthree

Considering he works in a library and probably paid the fine its a minor crime and he paid his debt to library society

Ariel Rosenfeld

I'm a librarian, and can never figure out why people get so racked up about losing books or not returning them on time. They come to us weeping, with rent garments and ashes in their hair, saying "I am so so so sorry, my apartment burned down with all my possessions, and I was only able to save one of your books, and then they wouldn't let me out of the burn ward to return it. Please don't hit me." And we're like "Dude, that is copy 3 of 5, and no one has checked any of the other copies out while you had this one out. Buy us replacements for the lost books on Amazon, and give us $1.75 late fee for this one. We will overlook the smoke damage and the bits of charred flesh stuck to the cover. Et ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Dewey, et Cutter, et Ranganathan." Then they cry. What is all that about anyway? The real problem with losing R.L. Stine books, or any horror stories, is that you almost always lose them on purpose so that you won't scare yourself reading them anymore. Secretly, you know where they are. You have to spend immense amounts of psychic energy hiding their location from yourself. You have to always unconsciously keep track of where the book is, so as to never accidentally find it again. The longer you do this, the more frightening the hidden book becomes. There is a copy of Frank Belknap Long's _The Hounds of Tindalos_ inside a wall of the house I grew up in. I can feel it looking at me. It knows where I am. I can never go back.

I guess it depends on how you pronounce "teh," but I don't see it.

Eric Sieck

But it's still open season for staff.

Dean Reilly

Oh, no... they still tar and feather. It's just off the record now.

awgiedawgie

They moved on to lime and cement?

MikeT

"Smif stopped tarring and feathering students in 1956" ...Only officially.

awgiedawgie

I'm sure that fed into Marten's insecurity about his job at some point. "Oh no, will they let me keep working here if they know I lost a book? Of course they wouldn't. I need to bury my dark secret. They would never want to employ a BOOK-LOOSER"

Bagge

My family had like 10 RL stine books when i was growing up. I don't remember us buying any of them.

Dylan T

I've been reading QC since the beginning and I just now realized the "TEH shirt" is pronounced exactly like "t-shirt". Heh.

Carl Fink

RL Stine Books are kind of free floating entities. They come and go at their leisure. Some kid probably found two thirds of an RL Stine trilogy in his garage the same day Marten lost his book.

Mitchell Sealy

Nice to see the TEH shirt back again.

Andrew Mitchell

Oh jesus Martin don't confess a crime like that to your LIBRARY SCIENCE GIRLFRIEND.

Buck Caldwell

Real Life Stine

Seth Aaron Hershman has they she pronouns

how dare you

if it was an rl stine book who fucking cares