On Inscriptions
and books that come home
Another trip to the used bookstore, another copy of The Elements of Style, another cat-and-mouse with myself over whether I already own the book, chasing dim memories of either ordering the thing or merely placing it on my wish lists or maybe holding it uncertainly in my hands in some bookstore visit past. This day I went for it. At my all-time favorite bookstore, Left Bank Books in Hanover, New Hampshire, I chose one of three copies, and it was all about the inscription.
A newer and less tattered edition for only a $1.50 more sat on the shelf beside the one that became mine, but its inscription was too sad:
“Dear Bess, this is a book you will keep for your whole life, Love, Mom –2003.”
Either Bess’s Mom was wrong about her daughter’s appreciation for the old Strunk & White, or her daughter didn’t value her mom’s gift . . . or Bess’s life in the world that houses this volume and Left Bank Books ended earlier than anticipated, and my own bookshelves do not need to bear that kind of burden.
Instead, I chose the edition inscribed:
“Potter: Why don’t you get something other than books so i don’t have to keep writing in them. This is, obviously, for the dream of writing . . . best damn grammar book ive ever read & the only one i’ve ever enjoyed. Kevin” [sic]
Yes! This is the stuff! To whoever goes (went?) by the phenomenal name of Potter and has a friend who cares enough to support your writerly dream, may you have been received these pages back in 1979 when they were first published and kept them close these last forty years, perhaps so close that now, in your sixties or seventies, you know them by heart and have donated this volume to this very store at just such a time that I may have and hold the “best damn grammar book,” the only one your friend Kevin has ever enjoyed. (Also, did you end up writing as you had hoped? I’d love to read some of your stuff.)
“When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos...”
― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
But the best interior markings I’ve ever found in a used book weren’t an inscription, nor was the book retrieved from a used bookstore. It shipped to me from a warehouse in Pennsylvania by means of an online order. From its owner’s notes, I knew it would be an ex-library copy. I like ex-library copies, since they tend not to be highlighted or underlined (which, in contrast with inscriptions, gets on my last hot reading nerve). They are not too tatty, only bearing the soft-edged wornness of periodic patrons’ fingers, and that smell, along with the library’s possessive stamp of embossment and (if I’m lucky) an old library card envelope affixed to the back inside page, complete with reading history. This volume did me far better.
To begin with, it is an essay collection edited by Anne Fadiman, which can never disappoint, even if gifted to some silly soul in in the year of the book’s birth 2003 who didn’t recognize its worth and keep it forever. Further, it bore not an embossed stamp, but a scan sticker across its exterior back cover, declaring—wait for it—
“Montgomery-Floyd County Library System”
Nothing? Of course not. You don’t live in one of the numerous Montgomery Counties that populate our country, but at the time, I did, and at first I thought, “That’s funny. I also live in a Montgomery County.” Then the green-inked stamp on the book’s back flyleaf, barely legible through its exterminating Sharpie strike-through:
“Property of Blacksburg Public Library, Blacksburg, Virginia”
My local library. The book had not only come home to me; it had come home.
Maybe books always come home. Maybe Bess’s book found a home with her for just the time she needed it, or maybe hers wasn’t the place for it to thrive, so it bounced back to the bookstore, and someone else who doesn’t mind the maudlin ambiguity of her mother’s note has retrieved it. I imagine Strunk & White lived happily with Potter for quite some time, and today it looks satisfactorily nested alongside Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, both of which I found in the same bookstore at different times.
In an essay about uniting her husband’s bookshelves with her own, Anne Fadiman claims that
“Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.”1
She also says that
“The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.”2
It seems like one of the places the edges meet is in the half-mysteries of inscription and the knowledge that these books have lived other lives before they joined mine here. Sure, Kevin recommends Potter get something other than books, but hopefully Potter, like me, never took his advice.
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, which lives on my bookshelves
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, which also lives on my bookshelves
This is delightful, Rebecca.
Oh, Rebecca! How I love this essay, on more levels than I can describe. And yes, it is the best damn grammar book I’ve ever read. Though I hear Dreyer’s English is a hoot.