They took their home library seriously enough to follow the practices of professional librarians. William made his own children sign a checkout slip if they wanted to carry a book from one floor of the house to another, and whenever the Friedmans acquired a book, they pasted a custom bookplate inside the cover, a rectangle of card stock designed by a professor friend who studied Mayan writing. The illustration on the bookplate showed a crimson warrior swinging an axe down upon the skull of a human.
