G. K. Chesterton was a rather notorious abuser of his books. His friend Digby d’Avigdor recalls him as a boy at St. Paul’s: "I always have a vision of him wandering around the corridors with one of his disreputable books ..."

D’Avigdor continued: "... His Greek primer all dog-eared, tattered, covered with drawings of goblins, all over the text as well as in the margins. The masters would say, 'Chesterton, Chesterton, have you no care for books?'" (Ward, 1952, p. 13).

The images here are from GKC's textbook Introduction to Latin Prose. That book is described in Maisie Ward’s biography as having been "withdrawn from him … because it was drawn all over with devils" (Ward, 1944, p. 107). Actually, there are no devils in the book — I checked.

Father John O’Connor ("Father Brown") on Chesterton's reading habits: "Most of his books, as and when he read, had gone through every indignity a book may suffer and live. He turned it inside out, dog-eared it, pencilled it, sat on it, took it to bed and rolled on it, ..."

O'Connor, continued: "... and got up again and spilled tea on it — if he were sufficiently interested." Fr. O’Connor said that when Chesterton was done reading, the object of his attention would have a "refuted look" about it. (Ward, 1944, p. 219).

Here is a pic of one of the last books GKC was reading at the time of his death. This was found in one of his pockets. “Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past”