You’ve heard of a chop shop, where cars get stripped down and sold off piece by piece. Well, Matt Kirkland has a much stranger idea. He calls it “Chop That Book Up Into Reasonable Sizes,” and the concept is exactly what it sounds like: take one enormous book and turn it into smaller, manageable volumes. Kirkland came up with the idea after tackling a giant paperback of Lonesome Dove, and frankly, I think he’s onto something.
Forget book burning, this guy wants you to chop your books. The horror of it! Bibliophiles everywhere are going to lose sleep over this. We’re not talking about dog-earing a page or cracking the spine. We’re talking about actually cutting the damn book apart. Kirkland’s response is wonderfully casual: “You can just chop up your book. Nobody will call the cops.”
Somebody should book this guy. This is murder. Not legally, of course, but somewhere a bibliophile just collapsed onto a fainting couch at the thought of watching War and Peace being chopped into pieces. At this point, somebody should probably hire Kirkland for the fire department in Fahrenheit 451. They already specialize in dealing with books, and clearly this guy has the knife skills.
But maybe the idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds. We treat books like sacred objects, but their main job is to be read. If a book is so big that carrying it feels like transporting a paving stone, perhaps it has crossed the line from reading material into household furniture. Kirkland’s idea is simple: make the book work for you instead of making you work for the book.
Has this guy ever heard of CliffsNotes? Just saying. Why chop up a 1,000-page book when you could read the important parts and pretend you finished the whole thing? Then again, maybe Kirkland is onto something. Take War and Peace. Depending on the edition, you’re dealing with well over a thousand pages. Chop it into four manageable volumes and suddenly Tolstoy looks a little less intimidating. Stephen King’s The Stand has the same problem, while It is another famous brick. “I finally finished It.” Well, Volume One anyway.
Harry Potter isn’t innocent either. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix tops 800 pages in the U.S. edition, making it another candidate for the chop. Then there’s The Lord of the Rings, which proves somebody in publishing already understood the problem. Tolkien’s epic is commonly sold as three volumes, so apparently Middle-earth was considered too much to carry in one piece. That’s not chopping. That’s common sense.
And let’s be honest, there’s a business opportunity here. Why sell one giant book when you could sell three smaller ones? That’s money in the bank. The reader gets something easier to carry, while the publisher gets three covers, three spines and three opportunities to make a sale. Everybody wins, except the bibliophile watching War and Peace become War and Pieces.
I like Kirkland’s idea because it challenges the rules we’re taught about books. Don’t bend the spine. Don’t write in the margins. Don’t dog-ear the pages. Keep the thing looking exactly as it did when you bought it. But a book isn’t a museum piece. It’s something you use, carry around and, most importantly, read. If cutting a giant paperback into smaller pieces means you’ll actually finish it, maybe you’re not destroying the book. Maybe you’re making it useful.
So when does a book stop being portable and become a piece of furniture? Kirkland found his answer with Lonesome Dove, and plenty of other books could use the same treatment. Maybe some books aren’t too long. They’re just too damn big.
Big book. Smaller bites. Same story. Much happier wrists.
Recommended Reading
More from Sandbox World
- A Book of Days by Patti Smith
- What Dan Read: Dan Pelzer’s Life Measured in Books
- Why William Blake Was the Original Independent Creator
Further Reading
- Chop up your books — Matt Kirkland
- The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition — Stephen King
- War and Peace — Library of Congress
If this article made you think, brought back a memory, or made you see something differently, I’d love to hear from you. Send me an email at sandboxworld@gmail.com. I read every message personally and, with your permission, may feature your thoughts in a future article because the best stories are the ones we share.
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