Twice in the last month I have checked out a book from the library only to find it ruined by some asshole’s insipid observations and comments penciled in the margins. In both cases the comments were obnoxious and snotty and gave me the impression that the writer thought he or she was being pretty clever and incisive.
But oops, hang on a second! How can that be?
HOW CAN YOU THINK YOU’RE SMART AT THE EXACT MOMENT YOU ARE ENGAGING IN THE CLASSLESS AND MORONIC ACT OF DEFACING A LIBRARY BOOK?
?!
Jesus. It must take a special kind of mental defect to allow someone to not notice that they are doing something profoundly stupid while they are trying to be profound. I can’t even wrap my mind around the image of this person who somehow was taught that a good way to read is to pencil your thoughts into the margins and really passionately interact with the book using many exclaimation points and emphatic underlining to really give that author what for and yet at the same time, never being taught that library books belong to everyone and that it is punkish and rude to deface them.
Obviously if there are two people who do this there must be more. This must be a fairly common type of person. Knowing this provokes a horrible emotional reaction in me. The reaction consists of the following:
In “Prick Up Your Ears,” Joe Orton and Ken Halliwell are sent to jail for typing mildy obscene and actually very funny flycover notes and pasting them into library books.
Other than that , I’ve never encountered a hand notation in a library book that wasn’t obnoxious, self-important and usually innacurate.
I admit to the urge myself. Last month I was reading a book that kept referring to Admiral “Bobby” Fischer. I had a strong, stong urge to line out 'Bobby" and write “Jackie” above it, but:
It’s NOT my book
The author’s stupidity is NOT my problem
In this modern age, if someone has an issue with a book, they can post a review on Amazon for all the world to be thunderstruck.
The first book was Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Communitiy and just an example of the type of comment:
Author: …kids are not “joiners” anymore…
Dingaling: …B.S.!!! they just join raves!!!
That one sticks out in my head because I know the person who wrote in this book was not a raver and besides that, the author’s point was that kids today don’t do things like Scouting that bring them into contact with people of all ages and types, not that they never congregate. Besides, what’s the point of writing it when you can just think about it?
The second book was Status Anxiety by Alain De Botton and when I saw the comments I just closed the book and wept quietly for 10 minutes so I didn’t catch what the notes said.
I can’t remember the book, but it was a novel that I checked out from the library. When I got home, I realized every swear word had been carefully and thoroughly inked out.
Thank you, kind stranger, for considering my tender sensibilities.
I hated the outdoors. And I hated the fact that my Father was willing to be a Scoutmaster. He never spent any time with me, but he’s spend it with 24 strangers!
I hated those kids.
This was in the 70’s. A Chicago troop, based in a Catholic church, in Logan’s Square.
I found a Stephen King book where every swear word had been crossed out.
Dude, you don’t care that you’re reading a bloody, violent, horror book with sex in it and you’re worried that they might have said ‘fuck’ when the big monster was eating them?
I’m generally appalled by people who deface books. What I usually run into isn’t censoring but mostly people ripping out pages and pictures for their own use.
Occassionally I make a correction to a blatant factual error and I don’t see anything particularly wrong with that.
The worst was reading Denying the Holocaust by Deborah Lipstadt. Some previous reader had a running dialogue with the author in black ink. At first he had some minor issues with some of her statements, but by the end he was scrawling “Jewess!” in the margins. I spent a bit of time with white-out on that book before I returned it to the library.
The coolest was someone who left a “time zap” from 1971 or so in a Jerry Rubin book for future readers.
I once checked out a book that someone had highlighted virtually every line in. Not only every line, but almost every word. So in a sentence like:
The information paradox arises out of two contradictory properties of black holes. Anything that falls within the black hole’s event horizon is lost from the universe forever. Hawking discovered a quantum chink in this armor in 1974, when he deduced that black holes should in fact emit a random trickle of particles and radiation.
I would highlight as above, but never in a book that wasn’t mine. But the dufus would highlight the whole thing.
Library book annotaters are bad, but their misdeeds are nothing to what I saw one time in a library book while I was in college. The book was one of those Time Life science books–“Giant Molecules”, the one on plastics–and some shit had scrawled sarcastic anti-technology crap comments over many pages. I mean, if that’s the way you feel, make a sign and go marching or something, but don’t deface books that belong to the community.
I once checked a book called Ovid as an Epic Poet out of the university’s library. Not only did it have numerous pages exacto’d (not torn, put precision cut with a knife) out of the text, someone who had read it at some point didn’t like the author’s translations of cited Latin passages, so that person had just scribbled all over them until they were illegible. I, of course, checked out the book because I was supposed to do a ‘book report’-type presentation on it for a class.
When I brought the book back to the library, I showed the book to the staff to point out the damage. They withdrew it from the collection, but (of course) immediately thereafter their other copy of Ovid as an Epic Poet was stolen, and the book is apparently out of print and hard to get, so now we have no copies at all of the book. Grrrr.
I bought several novels this semester for my Italian-American lit class. One novel, Christ in Concrete, opens with the extremely gruesome death of the protagonist’s father. I mean, it went on for three pages, it was explicit and disgusting and extremely well-written. I finish the chapter, more than a little shocked, and I look down to see somebody’s note, in pen…it said simply “He dies.”
Some idiot at my local library insists on writing “reviews” on the flyleaves of all the books he or she checks out. Often, said reviews contain major spoilers. To murder mysteries.
