Yes!

Writes Ben Schott in the New York Times Sunday Book Review:

While the ideas expressed in even the vilest of books are worthy of protection, I find it difficult to respect books as objects, and see no harm whatsoever in abusing them.

[...]

Indeed, the ability of books to survive abuse is one of the reasons they are such remarkable objects, elevated far beyond, say, Web sites.

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I ... enthusiastically turn down the pages of books as I read them — so much so that I have developed a personal dog-earing code: folding a top corner marks a temporary page position, while folding a bottom corner marks a page that might be worth revisiting. In both cases, the tip of the fold points toward the relevant passage. Of course, this could be achieved with a ribbon or a bookmark; but so many books are bereft of ribbons, and I have always thought there is something ever so slightly shifty about those who always have a bookmark on hand.

My favorite act of abuse is writing in books — and, in this at least, I follow in illustrious footsteps. Mathematics would be considerably poorer were it not for the marginalia of Pierre de Fermat, who in 1637 jotted in his copy of the “Arithmetica” of Diophantus, “I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition that this margin is too narrow to contain.” This casual act of vandalism kept mathematicians out of trouble for 358 years. (Andrew Wiles finally proved Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1995.)

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It is notable that those who abuse their own books through manhandling or marginalia are often those who love books best. And surely the dystopia of “Fahrenheit 451” is more likely avoided through the loving abuse of books than through their sterile reverence.

We couldn't agree more.

RTWT here.