Some depraved person who uses my local library and apparently has the same taste in books that I do often makes grammatical corrections in pen. This creature drives me mad. Argh! It is so much more jarring to have their arrogant, often-wrong correction jerk me out of the book than to encounter a minor error.
I do. To begin with, I’m a lot more likely to believe the author than some book-defacing member of the general public. I’m not likely to take the correction seriously.
You beat me to it, I was just thinking of exactly the same spot - this episode had me giggling.
“Can’t-stands-ya! Can’t-stands-ya!”
Gamaliel, you’re going to get a call from Stephen King’s Library Police, if you keep that up. Now that’s some scary stuff. I love that story, creeps me out to no end.
My favorite was one I saw recently.
Lolita. When Humbert is describing how he was taught to use the pistol, he describes several instances of killing squirrels or birds, and some numbnuts had underlined each one and written “A DESPICABLE ACT” and “DITTO” and “DOUBLE DITTO” right by them. Yeah, middle aged dude has kidnapped a young girl and is raping her on a regular basis (yes, I know that’s not the point of the book), and you are shocked, shocked I say, by the senseless murder of a squirrel. :dubious:
In my local library I’ve borrowed a couple of books in the crime section where someone has blacked out every instant of a character taking the Lord’s name in vain. So if a character says "goddamn’ or “oh my God” it’s just “----damn” or “oh my —”. Some people need better hobbies.
Hey, it’s a really cheap way to be published 
Seriously, though, quality marginalia does not bother me, and occasionally is of interest. It’s the dumb crap that I could do without.
There. That’s better.
Oh, c’mon, somebody had to do it…
XXXXdammit, that’s exactly what I XXXXXXX hate, you XXXX sucker.
Exactly. After college I donated quite a few of my books to the local library. I’m sure quite a few of them contained my obnoxious and self-important margin notes.
The defaced books are now museum pieces.
When I was in college, I went to the university library to research some information on a medical condition my doctor had mentioned (polycystic ovarian syndrome.) This was in the 80’s, when the condition was not nearly as well documented, and there weren’t internet references readily available.
So, I go deep into the medical science stacks and look into some gynecology textbooks, and find that pictures have been razor-cut out of the books, and other pages are stuck together.
Yuck.
And, dudes… there were photocopiers on every floor. You didn’t have to cut the clinical pictures out to take home for your own “enjoyment.”
Oh yeah. Worse than the added notes are the cut-out pictures and pages, I must agree.
I once bought a discarded book from a library. It was a very good book and I was enjoying it, until I discovered that the last 10 pages or so had been ripped out. So much for the ending.
A disgruntled foreign student at the university where I got my first degree went through an entire linguistics textbook replacing ‘Spanish’ with ‘Castilian’. A true labour of Catalan love.
Once, I checked out a book by Diophantus, and some idiot had scribbled a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in the margin!
Hey, a good rave is an excellent opportunity for people to reach across boundaries they normally wouldn’t come into contact with, thus raising their social capital, and therefore their involvement with their community.
What? Hey, I’m just amazed that three people (pokey, Dingaling and myself) have read Bowling Alone!
I checked out “To Life” by Rabbi Harold Kushner, “a celebration of Jewish being and thinking” according to its cover and a terrific read, until I got to the part where some *…christian… * had written their personal theology on “Jesus is Lord” in the margins.
I’m a librarian. For a while it was popular for people to check out books on alternative theologies and gay studies at a tiny college where I worked and return them with Chick pamphlets inside. Some of our gay books also had a habit of finding their way into toilets. Most disturbing though is that a copy of a Michael Moore* book at my current library came back heavily stained by coffee and with water damage and annotated with “LIES!” and “LIBERAL CRAP!” type marginalia after check-out by a professor!
We elevated the issue to his superiors with the “if this happens again his borrowing privileges are revoked” (which can be bad for a professor) and the matter was, I’m told, addressed in “why this is not appropriate treatment of state property” frankness. Other professors have scribbled much more “professional” marginalia with pencil into books they’re using for research and then erased them while standing at the counter when checking them in, evidently not having heard the word “palimpsest” or anything similar and believing that erasure is complete and total.
*Frankly, I can’t stand Michael Moore and think much of what he writes is crap and half-truth, but I don’t care if it’s The Secret Protocol of the Learned Elders of Zion that you have a beef with- it ain’t you’rn. Write a letter or an article or what have you, but as the philosopher Doug Llewellyn used to say five times per week in reference to the renderings of the Honorable Joseph Wapner, “Don’t take the law into your own hands…”.
Bit of a diversion, but a school friend of mine had a Bible in which he underlined virtually every verse. I used to borrow is sometimes just to see which bits he *hadn’t * underlined.
I don’t even like to write in books I own, I can’t stand it when people write in library books. Bastards.