I love books, and I own a ton of them. Not that I’ve read most of them, but still I love them — the objects. I don’t bend back the covers, so that my twice-read copy of Lucky Jim hasn’t a single crease in the spine. I don’t fold page corners to mark my place — the top and sides of my much-thumbed Tom Jones are as milky-white as when I bought it in 1983. And when I mark books up, as I always do, I do it in pencil, lightly, so the offending annotations can be erased at some future date, and in a teensy-weensy little script that would doubtless spur hours of productive Freudian analysis.
While I still buy used books, I avoid ones that have been marked or highlighted. An annotated book is a defaced book, is my motto. As I discovered in college, when I last bought scribbled-in books, there’s a more temperamental reason for this disinclination. You cannot read a book marked by someone in pen without taking a real dislike to most annotators. Book- markers are vandals to start with, and going mano a mano with someone who can’t hit back doesn’t exactly bring out the best in people.
As I remember it, there were, first of all, the hotheads, who would do little more than register their enthusiastic agreement or disagreement. ” No!,” their Molly Bloomstyle marginalia would run. “No! Yes/No/Yes/Yes! Yes!”
Then there were the feminists and various other freelance sex maniacs. They’d take a sentence like “Quentin steered east towards the lighthouse, pulling the rudder firmly towards him and nosing the sloop downwind.” And they’d circle nouns and write next to each of them in the margin “= PENIS.”
Finally there were the selftaught philologists. Roughly half of used foreign-language books have been previously owned by someone who hopefully told himself, “At the end of this goddamn book, I’m really gonna know French,” and threw in the towel after 3 or 9 or 13 pages of relentless interlinear scribbling. These books are nearly spotless, but the first three pages contain a string of grubbily scrawled definitions riding above the text like an alternative narrative in pidgin, as in:
Long time go to sleep hour
Longtemps je me suis couche de bonne heure. or an unrelated comic counterpoint, as in:
I have (brought????) more souvenirs from / Milan?
J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans . . .
Halfway through college, I quit buying used books, reckoning it a bad way to save money (= BEER).
Two weeks ago, I broke my rule. I had long wanted to read James Morris’s Pax Britannica Trilogy, and when I saw the first volume for $ 4 in a used book store, I bought it on impulse. It was heavily marked, in pen, but the markings petered out at page 191, and I figured that once I got there it would be smooth sailing. The book had clearly been used for a course, which by the look of the annotations was called something like “Imperialism and Racism: The Anglo-Saxon Way” and given at a really lousy college. Take the chapter on the British involvement in Afghanistan. Towards the beginning is written, in big, loopy, dumbo printing, apropos of nothing in particular, “Akhbar plays on Britian’s great shame.” Then a few similarly scribbled-up pages before the professor acquaints the class with his vast range of historical reference. “Similar to the unplanned and gradual involvement in Viet Nam,” someone has dutifully written. The coup de grace comes during the passages describing the horrifying evacuation of Kabul in 1841, when the Afghans basically tortured to death 3,000 Britons and 12,000 Indian camp followers in the freezing cold — disemboweling them, driving stakes through their entrails, chaining children to trees and allowing parents to watch them freeze to death, etc., etc. That passage is marked, ” Brittish were culturally unable to trust the Afgans.”
I wonder what becomes of dopes like this reader. The book reminded me of the rubbish I’d been taught in high school and college and of the rubbish I used to spew out in turn in the margins of my own books. Anyone who saw one of them now would be alarmed to find its annotator had become a journalist. Specifically, I think of a great Irving Howe article I read in 1983. Howe was discussing how he’d been attacked during the Vietnam War by 19-year-old Harvard Maoists who accused him of being a tool of capitalism. One of them even stalked Howe across Harvard Yard, berating him for selling out. After about 15 minutes of this, Howe turned around and said calmly to the heckler, ” You know what you’re going to be in ten years? You’re going to be a dentist!”
But you know what? I don’t think my annotator is a dentist. I think he probably writes for the New York Times.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
