| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: a little hydrochloric or oxalic acid, or caustic potash may be put
in the water, according as the stains are from grease or from ink.
Here is where an unpractised binder will probably injure a book for life.
If the chemicals are too strong, or the sheets remain too long in
the bath, or are not thoroughly cleansed from the bleach before they
are re-sized, the certain seeds of decay are planted in the paper,
and although for a time the leaves may look bright to the eye,
and even crackle under the hand like the soundest paper,
yet in the course of a few years the enemy will appear, the fibre
will decay, and the existence of the books will terminate in a state
of white tinder.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tom Grogan by F. Hopkinson Smith: mind he never sang.
When, some time after, Billy emerged from O'Leary's door, he had a
two-dollar bill tightly squeezed in his right hand. Part of this
he spent on his way home for a box of cigarettes; the balance he
invested in a mysterious-looking tin can. The can was narrow and
long and had a screw nozzle at one end. This can Cully saw him
hide in a corner of his father's stable.
XII
CULLY'S NIGHT OUT
Ever since the night Cully, with the news of the hair-breadth
escape of the bid, had dashed back to Tom, waiting around the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: untilled garden, absolutely motionless, and casting on those who
watched him a fixed gaze, the insupportable light of which froze them
with terror. If, by chance, he walked through the streets of Tours, he
seemed like a stranger in them; he knew not where he was, nor whether
the sun or the moon were shining. Often he would ask his way of those
who passed him, believing that he was still in Ghent, and seeming to
be in search of something lost.
The most perennial and the best materialized of human ideas, the idea
by which man reproduces himself by creating outside of himself the
fictitious being called Property, that mental demon, drove its steel
claws perpetually into his heart. Then, in the midst of this torture,
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