Twelve Ways to Mark Up a Book
February 26, 2006
Bert Webb writes:
A new — or new looking — book is a treasure. In my experience, however, I have found that a well-marked book, becomes more like a treasured friend — one that you enjoy seeing again and again.
[cosmopoetica, reading, books]
Tags:
Books and Reading
All me-stream all the time.
content rss
February 26th, 2006 at 7:32 pm
I am an incorrigible book-marker-upper. Truly have a hard time retaining info if I don’t do this - and I don’t just mean with highlighter and underlining, but in writing tons of notes in the margins, to the point where some pages are rendered unreadable by anyone else. It’s very weird to re-read books I read years ago, and then scan through my old scribblings/ micro-journal entries.
So I have little in the way of saleable used books (at such times when I get broke enough that shedding prized objects becomes a serious consideration; alas, this is at least an annual occurrence).
On the other hand, I think I heard on NPR once something about how a cache of Hemingway’s old books had been found wherever he’d once lived in Cuba, marked up as all-get-out.
Needless to say, THOSE books have considerable value now.
So when we book-margin-scribblers are doing what we can’t help but do, we might as well consider the idea that their value would be increased in some manner, if only by our immediate heirs.
For my part, I’d be overjoyed if either of my parents had stashes of their own favorite, scribbled upon books. I could read them without feeling like I was doing anything overly naughty (like when I was nine and got busted for reading my mother’s diary - MAN was that fascinating), but I’d still get a couple of otherwise unavailable clues, which might shed some necessary light on their lives.
Good to be reading you again, Chris - take care - V.
February 26th, 2006 at 7:57 pm
I’ve put in as many as 160 dog-ears in a single paperback (”Lila: An Inquiry into Morals”) but *write* in a book? Blasphemy.
Although I’ve come to think “scholars margins” were one of the all-time most valuable design inventions—even if I don’t use them.
Good seein’ ya, V.
February 27th, 2006 at 12:27 am
Good seeing you as well, Beau. (Chris, don’t mind us as we use your virtual living room to catch up.) (Or, not really catch up, since as per usual I’m blog-wandering when I should have been asleep hours ago, so- )
I’m gonna hush up as soon as I finish here and go to bed, though even then, I’ll still be reading - and scribbling in - my most recent, already quite dogeared book. Which I haven’t read in something like eight years, so now my margin comments are in reply not only to the original text, but also to my own (wildly errant) ideas at age 27.
Surely, a decade from now - or whenever I pick it up again - I’ll conclude that everything I’m *currently* thinking is ridiculous, or at least half-baked.
BTW both of you: I’ve linked your from my new blog, although the construction/ evolutionary process with regard to both template and content is neverending. (What else is new?)
Sweet dreams y’all - V.
February 27th, 2006 at 6:22 am
V.,
No need to apologize to C on using the living room, I reckon’; he has bemoaned the chilling effect of overly narrow topic enforcement. There’s a difference between a thread that rambles and a thread that has been hijacked.
February 27th, 2006 at 6:59 am
Use the space as you will
re: book marking– I think that to leave a book untouched is the real blasphemy. If you love a book, you should show it how much you care by making notations in it… for you, for the book, for people to come…
February 27th, 2006 at 7:29 am
I much prefer to buy books used. I like the smell. I like the energy, the feel, the groovy vibe. I used to cut class in high-school so I could hit the used-book stores in downtown Long Beach. I love used books.
And yet, when I get a new book, especially a new mass-market or trade paperback, I take a delight in reading it and getting to the end and seein how close to “unsold” I can leave it. I like to leave no trace. I lament the inevitable darkening from the oils of my thumb on the edges of a thick book. Any visible crinkle in the spine is a statement of failure, a cause for shame. I suppose that’s another reason I prefer used books.
Clearly I need therapy.
February 27th, 2006 at 7:43 am
Oddly, I prefer used books too (I do have some slight moral qualms about not supporting the authors, at least occasionally)… but those are even *better* with marginalia! It makes my day when I get a book home and discover notes from other people in there
February 27th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
[Note in advance of submitting yet another overly long comment: I'm going to feel really silly if my ever-so-slight html markup in this comment text doesn't convey. I'm not a big fan of using code in comments in such situations (it seems, I dunno, presumptuous - if there isn't something explicit in the parent post or blog FAQ stating that it's okay to do that), but where something as apparently insignificant - to others - as boldface or italics makes a difference to me (oops, I did it again, and not in the manner of Britney Spears) in how certain words would be visually "heard" by others, I just can't help myself.]
I have found some of the weirdest stuff in used books! The first edition, signed copy of Robert Frost’s last collection wasn’t just a huge score for having found it for $2 at a thrift shop - I loved it as much for the YEARS of Robert Frost newspaper clippings its previous owner kept tucked inside. A collector I showed it to was appalled - the newspaper would stain the precious pages! Etc. But to me the newspaper clippings were as much a part of the book’s story as were its poems and inscription. I actually tried to find out who the owner was, without luck. I can only speculate that he or she passed away and some errant heir had no idea what he or she was getting rid of. (BTW: no, I did not, and would not write in the pages of that book.)
And sometimes, the stuff you find in used books is more subtle in its wonderfulness. I wrote a poem “Lament for Wilhelmina” after having picked up a Ferlinghetti book. It had nothing aside from that name - Wilhelmina - as the prior author’s markup, and for whatever reason, that name alone cracked me up enough to write a whole damned poem about it. Here - as long as Chris doesn’t mind my deviating further from the subject - it is:
Lament for Wilhelmina
Someone named Wilhelmina
– no last name given –
once owned my copy of Ferlinghetti’s
A Coney Island of the Mind.
Bagged beast of my bookstore
prowls, in every off-season,
I’ve found this
volume with its ankles caught
in rusted traps of used
romances, Westerns, sci-fi.
Wilhelmina, what have you done?
I’ve plundered your dead dreams
and have you to thank
for freeways fifty lanes wide
and steamheated cemeteries
(© 2004 Victoria Marinelli, if that stuff counts for poems posted in the context of blog comments…)
March 7th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Spork is our hometown champion and brainchild of Richard Siken and Drew Burk. Richard is our hero.
And your site is our hero too. Heroes for everyone. Heroes.
Be good,
Jim Kober
March 13th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
I’m loving these “deviations”– it’s what blog discussions are all about!
The ephemera to be found in books is fascinating. It can lead to creativity or serendipitous rediscovery. A few years ago I picked up a copy of Breece D’J Pancake’s short stories and an ID fell out… belonging to the grad student who taught me in my very first college English comp course. Which happened to be the course that reaffirmed my deep affinity for Carver and my discovery of Breece’s work. It made me realize how much I owed that former teacher and eventually I was able to track him down to say thanks.
To my chagrin he has abandoned literature and teaching altogether, working instead in telecommunications!
March 14th, 2006 at 7:57 am
Hmm, sounds like another guy I know, started a poetry zine, but now it’s hard to get a haiku outta him.
March 14th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Yeah, but Brian’s contributions and potential were far greater than mine. My own disappearance should cause no chagrin
March 15th, 2006 at 6:08 am
I’m sure he rocked, but just because my attachment is personal
it is no less valid. There would be much chagrin in many
quarters. Which I why I still goad you to pen a little now
and then.
July 15th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
[...] A thought-provoking post on Cosmopoetica, his “writing/ art/ literature/ music/ etc.” blog, appears on the phenomenon of people who write in the margins of books (yes, the literal meaning of ‘marginalia,’ which I’m deploying in this link-farmish series as metaphor. This provoked a mini-torrent of discussion between another blogger Beau (no relation to Beau-Jacques, my dear friend in face-to-face land written about elsewhere in this blog), Chris, and myself, in which I committed that grievous sin I have always sworn never to commit - I posted an actual poem within my blog comments, Lament for Wilhelmina. Those dying of curiousity may eavesdrop on that conversation here. [...]