<< Literature in Public | Front Page | Homage to London: Songs and Poems >>
Thursday, July 07, 2005
Don’t Write in Books
Miriam Burstein writes about annotations in books and uses the phrase “deep-seated aversion” to describe students’ attitudes towards this wretched activity. Would that it were so.
You may remember reading about a microwave-type device developed by some research branch of the military that could heat the water in human tissues, causing excruciating pain without leaving visible signs of injury. Though it was, as I recall, described as a method of crowd-control, many immediately assumed that it would be used for torture. And like most free-thinking people, I condemn torture in the strongest possible terms. Except in one case: writing in library books.
Students (or professors) who write, highlight, and/or underline library books should have the words they so defaced scorched into their tissues with the aforementioned microwave device. As I understand it, no lasting harm will come from this, but the immense pain should serve as a deterrent.
Furthermore, you should not write in your own books. You will, at some point, die, and then what will happen to your books? Family may take them; they may end up at a Friends of the Library sale. Others will read them. And you have to realize that people studying your marginalia is, in most cases, unlikely. Just as you wish to preserve the environment for future generations, so should you preserve your books.
Comments
While I agree that library books should be sorely lacking in my marginalia, my own books will not be so misused. My heirs can go to hell---the value of a used book is the text itself, and while I abhor yellow highlighter and comments like “good point” or “I thought that when I was twelve”, I think that marginalia is not a bad thing of itself. When a passage sets me thinking a strange thought, down it goes in the margin, to be copied later if I think of it; when a line is particularly noteworthy, two scraggly (pencil) underlines mark it so. If I return to the book a couple years later, the amusement or pride in the foolishness or brilliance strikes me anew. Who writes marginalia for future readers? Like a myriad bastard children, these books will find their way into the world with or without my further help. May my marks either scar them or make them better for the journey---it’s all a father can do. Amazon.com can always provide clean books and pristine lovers for those who need them so polished.
~br.
What kind of Communist nonsense is this? Jonathan, these are my books; I own them and can do whatever I want to do with them. Other people’s books--library books especially--should remain pristine, but I’ll be damned if I let some liberal “academic” twit tell me what I can and can’t do with my books. Fact is, if I knew where you lived, I’d be throwing at you, you Pink Fancy Nancy.
(On another note entirely: the Critical Theory Archive at UCI contains almost no books that haven’t been extensively debased by students so desperate for validation that they look for it from anonymous posterity: “That’s not what Derrida means! Future readers of this copy of the book must know the truth,” he says, no doubt unaware of the irony.)
I’ll second the torture of library book abusers… but as for my own books, unless it’s a really nice first edition of Bellow or Pynchon (or something like my prized Houghton-Mifflin editions of Thoreau and Emerson or Frazer’s Golden Bough), it’s going to have some pencil in it.
I must say, though, that my moderate care with finished books goes completely by the board when I’m firing through a review galley: black pen circling passages, whole pages X-ed out, “HA!” scrawled across surprising (or ridiculous) paragraphs--a damned lot of fun, really.
Throwing at me? What kind of camp affectation is that?
And if poststructuralism has taught us anything, it’s that you don’t “own” books. Books use humans to reproduce, much in the manner of oaks and squirrels.
I’d be throwing my darn books at you, is what I meant. Golly!
Books use humans to reproduce, much in the manner of oaks and squirrels.
How Pninian. And here I thought the marginalia was supposed to be squirrelly.
A reserved, serious, polite man in my department with distinctive handwriting has deployed it all over the margins of books from his field in our campous library. Mostly the annotations say NO! CRAP!, delightful things like that.
Sometimes there’s a book in marginalia.
I would never do such a horrid thing to a book of mine, but buying most works of literature used, there is nothing I find more comforting than having the thoughts of some wise man/dolt to lean into/ push off of. It’s an instant symposium, and the fellow doesn’t talk back.
While I share the intuition that it is wrong (really quite wrong) to write in library books, I must admit that I don’t really feel so much outrage when I encounter a marked up library book, and I am often able to ignore the comments without too much trouble.
And when I don’t ignore such comments, I sometimes enjoy them. My library copy of Dubos’ CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON POETRY AND PAINTING has the following written neatly on the front page:To Whom it May Concern: Do not read this book--it is exceedlingly dry.
I also emit many an anguished curse against the library book marker. Blue ballpoint is particularly distracting.
Extended prose works are easier to read on paper than on a computer screen, but computer editions are easier to make a personal print copy from. Most of why that’s desirable is distribution economy, but some of why I personally find it desirable is the off-chance that some of these assholes will eventually mark up their own fucking copies.
Or, as in the case of Joel & myself, that these painstaking energetic readers will respond in a thoughtful fashion on our own fucking copies.
Less venomously, when it comes to books which may be passed on to people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to them—well, maybe because I was so dependent on libraries and the cheapest used books for much of my life, I’ve long since gotten into the habit of jotting “annotations” on their own sheets of paper. (After all, if I ever use them, I’d have to copy them anyway.) The only exception I can think of came when my favorite philosophy instructor finally published a book. It turned out to be just awful, and I found myself margin-scrawling in a shocked-stupid attempt to break him out of it: stop! stop! go back!
Has anyone here ever found anonymous annotations on a copy of his or her own book, or article or whatever? I must admit I’ve looked.
Do you mean, “Have you ever looked, in a library, at a book you’ve written to see whether anyone’s made annotations?”
Never done it, and wouldn’t go out of my way, but strikes me as occasion for an odd moment or two (and much stranger, say, than reading reviews/academic articles about my work).
Have you?
Marginallia is of extreme value to historians and archivists, especially those who focus their research on authors. Of ocurse, archival marginallia is best made with a pencil (as graphite is inherantly acid free).
Although I abhor writing in library books because I do not want to read others inane comments, I treasure a Latin reader that my grandmother marked up with thousands of comments, helpful lists of necessary grammatical concepts, and even a short, sarcastic poem on how difficult she thought a certain passage was. As I found myself frustrated with the same passage (it must be genetic) I burst out laughing when I read her poem and I felt close to her even though she died many years ago. So, mark up your own books, your heirs might like it but leave the library books alone!