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A Rant...

Cleopatra said:
I belong to the neurotics that keep their books in a way that make you believe that none has ever touched them.

Do you remember that woman in Elia's Canneti book,"Die Blendung" Therese(?) which touched the hero's books only if she had wore gloves in order to impress him? I take notes of the books I read but on tiny notebooks. Each book has its own notebook.Yes, I have already told my therapist about that!
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One of my few violent episodes as a teenager was when someone was damaging a book of mine. I lost my temper. When I told my grandma about it later, she pointed out that it was probably because a book was involved. So I've tried to lighten up. Now I gladly give my books out to anyone if I can share the enjoyment I got out of them.

If I own a book, sometimes I use a highlighter on it. I like this because sometimes I like to scan through an old book, and this way I can quickly review my favorite parts. Also, highlighter marks fade and are almost unnoticeable after many years. I would quickly loose any "tiny notebook". :P

But writing in library books is just wrong because libary books are community property.
 
uneasy said:
One of my few violent episodes as a teenager was when someone was damaging a book of mine. I lost my temper. When I told my grandma about it later, she pointed out that it was probably because a book was involved. So I've tried to lighten up. Now I gladly give my books out to anyone if I can share the enjoyment I got out of them.
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I am still a teenager :D

I can share my toothbrush but I am not giving books from my library. Never and to nobody. Why did your grandmother say that it was the involvement of a book that made you angry?

Yes, of course you are right, books from libraries are public property but book readers suppose to be romantic. Think of those public trees in the woods that cary inscriptions... :)
 
Cleopatra said:

I can share my toothbrush but I am not giving books from my library. Never and to nobody. Why did your grandmother say that it was the involvement of a book that made you angry?
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I am very different--I will readily loan my books, but always with the same condition (a condition to myself, not to the borrower): I will loan a book only if I do not care if it comes back; if it is a beloved book, then the borrower must be more beloved, and someone I would want to have that book.

Yes, there are books I have not gotten back, but they are in good hands.

As for damaging public books...I have found books in our library with entire sections cut out from them! This is, in my opinion, a hanging offense.

I have a few books I purchased used that do have writing in them. In at least one case, the writing adds tremendously to the book--I can trace a well-known scholar's thoughts as he reads his copy of a Robert Frost volume...I have heard him recite Frost from memory, and I have the book he learned it from. This peek behind the curtain was well worth the defacing of the book (besides, it was his at the time).
 
The only thing I leave in books are blood stains. For some reason none of the science books (OK that should be chemistry) I read have any markings in them.
 
geni said:
The only thing I leave in books are blood stains. For some reason none of the science books (OK that should be chemistry) I read have any markings in them.
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Yeah, me too, if I marked my chemistry textbooks, every passage would be underlined with multiple question marks next to it.
 
Reading this thread reminded me of a psycho in my local library when I was a teenager. I quite enjoy reading "whodunnits". This person has taken out all the whodunnits, underlined the name of the character that was the murderer, and wrote "murderer" next to it.
 
Now that's cruel....

Slightly off-topic, I understand that it's fairly common for folks doing forgeries of historical documents to go into libraries and razor-blade out the "extra pages" frequently found in old volumes to provide historically-correct paper for thier forgeries.

One fellow had quite a lucrative trade in forged documents that he was selling to the Mormon community; seems the Mormons are mad for historical/geneological stuff.
 
TruthSeeker said:
yes, people do it all the time AND it is very irritating.

Most bothersome is borrowing books from the university library and finding illustrations torn out, graphs plotted over the original (a test of the reader's versus the author's data perhaps?) and markings indicating which paragraphs will be lifted for an essay...
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To my eternal shame, I actually witnessed someone tearing out the pages of a magzine for the article they wanted on how to spray paint your car, and did nothing about it. I should have instantly yelled out "Stop Thief" and shot him, except I suppose you aren't supposed to use handguns in a library because they make such a racket.
 
Cleopatra said:

Canetti's hero,Peter Klein, says the proverbial about the books from public libraries( I remind you that his private library counts to up to 40.000 titles!)

" Books from public libraries are like prostitutes.If you are observant you can even smell on them the person who touched them just before you. Very annoying! " :)
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Isn't that the truth! I bought a used book once that smelled so strongly of tobacco smoke that I had to scrub my hands every time I handled it.
 
munkymu said:
Isn't that the truth! I bought a used book once that smelled so strongly of tobacco smoke that I had to scrub my hands every time I handled it.
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:)

Read Canetti's book too. It's a masterpiece.
 
Here

This is one of my favorite books. Not as favorite as the "Black Prince" of Iris Murdoch but it is among my 5 favorite books :)
 
Hmmm. I am reading Iris Murdoch's biography by Peter Conradi and I have just read that Murdoch was romantically involved with Elias Canetti and in fact he was the inspiration for the "Black Prince"....Amazing what you learn by reading biographies... My two favorite authors were actually sleeping together and he was teaching her Ladino, the language of the Sephardic Jews ( I knew that Canetti was a Sephardic Jew)

My poor grandma was right to insist on which was the best way to learn wealas languages...
 
Bikewer said:
Now that's cruel....

Slightly off-topic, I understand that it's fairly common for folks doing forgeries of historical documents to go into libraries and razor-blade out the "extra pages" frequently found in old volumes to provide historically-correct paper for thier forgeries.

One fellow had quite a lucrative trade in forged documents that he was selling to the Mormon community; seems the Mormons are mad for historical/geneological stuff.
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Yeah one guy did this( I believe Ex-Mormon ). HE made quite a bit of money too. He was very cleaver. He used the old pages so if they were carbon dated they would date out to the correct time. He also MADE his own ink using a recipe from that time, then mixed in ground up paper from those same books, so that when the ink was tested it would carbon date to the same time!

SSR
 
I'm guilty of making notes in books, but only my own and only those I use for teaching so I can appear to be a fountain of knowledge in front of the class. Mind you, it's not hard when most of them don't know how to hold a pen the right way up.
 
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