A decade ago (I can’t believe it’s been THAT long), I was lucky enough to do the teaching practicum required for my Goddard MFA at Gibbs College in Norwalk (thanks to my friend Chris Emmerson-Pace). I taught Comp 101, which required this book which was expensive as hell (as most college textbooks are): Literature Without Borders.

Despite the book’s cost, it was the absolute cheapest thing I’d ever seen. Pages–in sections–started falling out. By Week Four of teaching, I had to use an elastic band just to hold the pages in. By the end of the semester, there wasn’t one page attached to the binding or the cover. It might as well have been a loose stack of manuscript pages.

I’d forgotten about it, but last weekend, I was looking for another book when I discovered it in the bottom of one of my many bins of books. Apparently I was annoyed, because look what I did to it.