To the person who ripped out pages 289-292 of The Peguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories

What. the hell. IS WRONG WITH YOU, you sick fuck??

Who does that to a book?? A LIBRARY BOOK no less!!!

Book mutilator!!

There ought to be Library Cops, like in that Seinfeld episode. There really should. Literatecs like Jasper Fforde's intrepid book-traveling gumshoe Thursday Next.

Here I was, happily enjoying Dorothy Allison's "A Lesbian Appetite," and one minute they're slicing up eggplant, the next they're having sex. I would kind of like to know how they got from point A to point B, thankyouverymuch.

I'm not even sure it's a homophobic case of book mutilation, since the rest of the volume is in pristine condition, especially for a library book that's 12 years old. I mean, you'd have to be one hell of a closet case to get through nearly 300 pages of Sarah Orne Jewett, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Colette, Monique Wittig, Joan Nestle, and Jewelle Gomez before going all Orwellian on the thing. Did your two year old get his hands on it? Did your dog get hungry or something? Was the scene just so incredibly hot that not even a photocopy would do?

Not that I haven't been tempted to mutilate a book or two in my time. I came awfully close with Tropic of Cancer and Heart of Darkness. But I restrained myself, sent them on their way, to someone who could better stomach them. I turned a profit, everybody's happy. Is that so hard?

Grr. Argh.

I'm going to go read my copy of The Order of the Phoenix to cheer myself up.