A Theory of Dog Ears

What makes a real book lover? Is it protecting your books from all signs of use, keeping them clean and in perfect condition? In this episode of Monkey Mind, Sophus Helle argues that loving one's books can also be expressed by bringing them along everywhere, leaving notes in the margins and dogears to revisit special paragraphs. This is a way of documenting a book's life and creating its history outside of the fiction written on the pages. Using the alignment chart from Dungeons and Dragons, Sophus categorizes the various types of, as he puts it, "violence" readers subject their books to, touching upon Napoleon's unusual method of reading books. He compares the treatment of the type of art we see in museums with the way we treat books, and the question arises; are books more similar to original paintings or to the poster copies of those paintings?

Host: Sophus Helle

Written by: Sophus Helle

Sound editing: Simone Nystrup-Larsen

Editor: Andreas Lindinger Saxild

Monkey Mind

Combining wit and wisdom, silliness and seriousness, the podcast Monkey Mind by Sophus Helle takes the audience on a weekly jaunt through the jungle of the mind. Each episode throws a new and unusual light on the issues of everyday life—trees, typos, taxes, and much more besides—making the audience look again at a world they thought they knew. It tells stories that are designed to make the listener chuckle, then reflect, drawn from both the host’s own life and from the deep well of history.

Sophus Helle is a writer, translator, and cultural historian. He is an expert in the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh and the ancient poet Enheduana.