When I am a famous author and my trade paperbacks are published by Penguin or Little, Brown, I want whatever glue was used on David Sedaris’ Calypso. Every page practically opens flat and the opening looks like those magazines that you open flat and then the glue splits and the magazine disintegrates and all the pages fall out into a slippery mess, but that’s not what happens. There’s an elasticity to the glue that keeps the pages from separating from the spine. And it bends just as evenly at the beginning of the book as it does at the end so the spine is nicely flexible and it doesn’t just fall open to the page with “Fuck, fuck, fuck” in capitals and italics and bold (that’s hyperbole—there’s no sequence of decorated text like that…but there is “Whore.” at the end of a chapter before a lot of white space.) I’ll admit that I was initially apprehensive when the spine bent so easily at page 23. I thought it was cheaply made with crappy glue and poor paper.

When I was in high school, I lent a fellow classmate (initials mb) my “Catcher in the Rye,” and I asked her not to dog ear the pages or bend the spine. She looked at me like I was crazy and scoffed but she complied. And she probably never let it go.

Now I look at Calypso’s spine with admiration. The nice and even creases demonstrate a well-read book. It shows me that I actually enjoyed the book—the whole book—and I was happy to pass the time buried in the thick pages held together with elastic glue.

But the real question is: “Will the silverfish like it better than the old glue?”