Saturday, March 10, 2012

The Right to Deface; A Good Book Gone Bad


Eric finally retrieved all the books we bought on our day in the country and has been busily unpacking them. While he was at the home of the seller Monday night to retrieve the ones we didn't have room for the first time he  took the opportunity to reiterate the fact that we remain interested in the glorious collection we saw  in the home office in the basement . His choice of the word “interested” makes me laugh  though because I definitely am NOT interested. Interested is cool and  cerebral with a touch of insouciance. What I am is crazy-wild with red-hot desire to have them!

Whether or not we get them remains ambiguous though, so for now I will try to curb my fixation and focus on the books I did get. Eric sorted  the twenty-one boxes at the store and brought me home a handful of titles he thought I might like. Of these I liked four, rejected one, and fell dizzyingly in love with another. It’s the latter I want to talk about today, though not so much for the book itself as for the fate that befell it. The book is The Human Condition, the most important work written by Hannah Arendt, a Jewish political philosopher who survived Nazi Germany and in this book studied issues of labor, work and action, as well as the difference between the political and the social. I have not read it, so content was not what drew me. It was the physical book itself even though at first glance I mistook it for a Heritage Press title. It is not. It was published by the University of Chicago in 1958 and is the deluxe edition issued with a slipcase.

As much as I like its design and tactile qualities I still decided to list it (but also take it to the show if I still had it in April), so  yesterday afternoon I settled down to do just that. It  wasn’t until I  had assigned it a number in my database and filled in its vital statistics that I saw what had eluded me at first swoon. The book was damaged – badly, irretrievably, WILLFULLY damaged. Sometimes books get damaged for reasons we can’t control. They barely survive floods ( I know a lot about that), they perish in fires, the puppy exercises his teeth on a corner, a small child decides to color in the line drawings. These things I get. What I don’t get is underlining in ink, marginalia, and the worst of the worst – the dreaded highlighting. The Human Condition suffers from both underlining in ink and marginalia – i.e. comments in the margins which are deemed wonderful only if the one doing the commenting has serious street cred.

It could be argued that it’s a bit hypocritical of me to bemoan these particular personalizations when I wax poetic over gift inscriptions which many sellers deem to be almost as  defacing. I love inscriptions though  because they remind me that someone else was here first – a real person -- and that I am a link in a human chain spanning years, decades, sometimes centuries. So much do I like the personal aspect of books I’d even be willing to close one eye to underlining the occasional  favorite passage and/or jotting in the margin what the passage means to the reader (in pencil please). In fact, I might like that a lot. But only once in 15 years have I ever seen anything that qualified. Most underlining and margin writing is purely a knee-jerk reaction to our academic past. In college we were encouraged to highlight in order to study for finals so when faced with a complex book we revert to the tried and true. What I’ve noticed though is that rarely does the highlighting, underlining, note-taking extend beyond the first couple chapters, which is exactly the case with The Human Condition. All the sins take place in the first 42 pages – the rest is flawless. I shudder to think how many wonderful books have been so carelessly ruined  -- and for what? Clearly most were abandoned after defacement and not even finished.

I know, I know – the owner of a book has the right to do whatever he or she wants with it. Read it, mark it up, turn it into an altered book, break it up for parts, or glue it to another bunch of  books and put the whole thing on the shelf for decoration. As much as I deplore it, I would even argue in defense of that right. I just wish people would choose not to excerise it quite so frequently -- particularly on valuable books.

4 comments:

sundaymornancy said...

I've highlighted a lot of textbooks, but I've never written in a book of that quality. I don't even write in paperbacks. Must be the book borrower in me...

tess said...

I think it's the book respecter in you! It's a very good trait too. Booksellers the world over thank you.

Chartreuse said...

This is such an interesting topic, and I absolutely must write a post about it soon. You see, my husband suffers from progressive aphasia. His deteriorating brain is making all forms of communication (speaking, reading and writing) increasingly difficult for him. As a devoted lifelong reader of quality fiction and nonfiction, he now can only manage texts written for junior adult readers. But for quite a while now, he has obsessively annotated and underlined what he reads. Apparently this somehow enables him to better process the text. Who knows why others deface books. But my husband does it from a devotion to reading, and a determination to continue his connection with books as long as he can possibly manage. However, except for one delirious time during a recent hospitalisation for pneumonia, he has carefully avoided marking up library books. (Our local librarian was very understanding about that, though I'm sure she was horrified.) And he will not put a mark in precious volumes such as the 35 books in his collection of the Tusitala edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's writing. Anything else is fair game, I'm sorry to say.

tess said...

Thank you for writing. That's a very interesting perspective, but I think what he is doing is not really defacing books at all. Anything that helps a book lover read and enjoy books I'm all for! It's very cool too that he treasures certain ones and refrains from marking them. I hope he keeps reading and enjoying it --whatever it takes!