Well-thumbed

Found in a textClipping file on my desktop; I think it’s a response to somebody asking about the term “a well-thumbed book” that I had trouble posting and saved and maybe never got back to:

The term dates back to the days before tape decks in cars. No books-on-tape, so if you wanted reading while you drove, somebody’d have to sit there reading to you. Hitch-hikers would wave books to flag down rides. A “well-thumbed” book was one that had been used a lot in this way. It eventually came to mean any book that had been read a lot.

In other news, I think my infant niece Amanda will grow up to become a ninja.

And Lost in a Good Book, the second of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels, is better than The Eyre Affair, the first.