Dog's-eared

There were a couple of forms, notched and cut and inked all over; a small deal desk perched on four legs, at which no doubt the master sat; a few dog's-eared books upon a high shelf; and beside them a motley collection of peg-tops, balls, kites, fishing-lines, marbles, half-eaten apples, and other confiscated property of idle urchins.

He remembered all about the incident of the boxes, and from a wonderful dog’s-eared notebook, which he produced from some mysterious receptacle about the seat of his trousers, and which had hieroglyphical entries in thick, half-obliterated pencil, he gave me the destinations of the boxes.

1931, Conrad Aiken, Preludes for Memnon, XLI, in Selected Poems, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 131, […] The carpet there, the table On which the dog's-eared Euclid with fixed stars, The cardboard battleship, the tops, the jackstones, And the long window lustred with changing rain, And the long day, profound and termless.