Thomas Vander Wal (vanderwal.net)I continually think I have written about gutting books in the past, but have only mentioned it and alluded to it. When I bring it up I often get asked about and want to point to my explanation, as there are few resources elsewhere (there is one that surfaced in 2009 from Naomi Standen guiding her students How to gut a book).
For those looking to delve in deeper to gutting books, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren go into greater depth in How to Read a Book (Touchstone, 1972, 2011) in which they discuss various levels of reading books with which many students are less familiar. They break reading down into various modes including inspectional reading, analytic reading, and syntopic reading which are the sorts of reading one should be able to accomplish by late high school or certainly by the college level. Unfortunately not too many people are reading this way anymore, if they ever did.
Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis (MIT Press, reprint/translation 2015 [1977]) goes into greater depth on taking one’s guttings and turning them into new material.