Writing in books...

From Nov. 15:

...I'm curious how many of us write notes in our books. Are you a Footprint Leaver or a Preservationist?

The easy answer: I don't write in books. I don't even write in workbooks like Workbook for Wheelock's Latin, which are meant to be written in. I write in notebooks or on pieces of paper, separately.

This isn't to say I never write in books. Sometimes I put a discreet pencilled five-point star in margins to mark passages I want to find again; I did that sometimes as a student. Haven't done it in decades, perhaps. But I might. Not if it were a library book, or someone else's book. There's not much I hate more than finding underlining or highlighted passages in a library book.

Sometimes I love finding someone else's notes in a book, though. It's like a glimpse of another life - like overhearing someone else's secret.

When I was a student in high school, I used to write on the endpapers, the white pages on the inside front and back covers. Because I was bored in various classes, and I had a passion for poetry, I used to write (in the tiniest handwriting I could manage) the poetry I had memorized. Byron, Browning, Eliot, Shakespeare. Once a teacher caught me doing this. He was so so confounded he didn't say a word. I still have some textbooks like this.

In historical works, it can be exciting. I once read about a manuscript from the early middle ages, in which a monkly scribe of the eighth century had written frigiscente mundo in the margin - the world is growing cold. That put chills down my back.

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Addendum: Not to mislead you here - it's not that I don't mistreat books. I don't write in them, no. I don't turn down corners. I often put on paper covers so they don't get damaged. But I've been known to tear out pages, or cut books into sections so the parts will fit in a pocket or purse, and then I discard sections as I read.