09 August 2012

Joys of used books.

Two characters discuss a scholar:
"'He has got no good red blood in his body,' said Sir James.

"'No. Somebody put a drop under magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs Cadwallader."

-from Chapter 8 of Middlemarch
In the margins of the copy I got from a used book store, written in pencil:
Gha!
Sickle-
cell

2 comments:

J.L. Wall said...

On the other hand, you sometimes get the previous reader who wrote "Ha!" in the margin everytime they found something funny. In a comic novel. Such that I had no way to avoid thinking, "Punch line ahead in two lines!" at least three times a page.

Someday, someone's going to stumble onto my marginalia in a used book store and wonder what the hell I was thinking, finding this or that passage interesting enough to warrant an exclamation mark.

william randolph brafford said...

I was trying to remember when and where I posted some pictures of the work of an annoying previous reader. Turns out it was in response to something you wrote:

http://williamwrites.blogspot.com/2008/12/piety-hope-generosity-wow.html

Now that I'm well out of college, I find that I only write in a book if I'm planning to write a review of it.