More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
After five years of marriage and a child, George and I finally resolved that we were ready for the more profound intimacy of library consolidation.
In the shelves next to our bed, we created a new category: Books by Friends and Relatives. I’d gotten the idea from a writer friend (now represented on these shelves herself) who had done the same, saying it gave her a warm feeling to have so many of the people she loved gathered together in one place.
During the next thirty years I came to realize that just as there is more than one way to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book.
Even in the heat of passion, Byron remembered to observe proper inscription etiquette by writing on the flyleaf instead of the title page, which is traditionally reserved for a book’s author.
Shaw once came across one of his books in a secondhand shop, inscribed To———with esteem, George Bernard Shaw. He bought the book and returned it to ———, adding the line, With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.
Our mother confided that for several years she had been filling a large envelope with mistakes she had clipped from her local paper, the Fort Myers News-Press, with the intention of mailing them to the editor when they achieved a critical mass.
My father, who at age twenty-four had been a proof-reader—indeed, the entire proofreading department—at Simon & Schuster, admitted that in the full flush of his youthful vanity he had routinely corrected menus at posh Manhattan restaurants and handed them to the maître d’s on his way out.
unenlightened! If you had been alive in 1631, it would have made your day to come across the seventh commandment in the edition of the Bible specially printed for King Charles I, which read, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
Picture? Proofreaders tend to be good at distinguishing the anomalous figure—the rare butterfly, the precious seashell—from the ordinary ground, but, unlike collectors, we wish to discard rather than hoard.
Between them, our parents had about seven thousand books. Whenever we moved to a new house, a carpenter would build a quarter of a mile of shelves; whenever we left, the new owners would rip them out.
When you read silently, only the writer performs. When you read aloud, the performance is collaborative. One partner provides the words, the other the rhythm.
