Read Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader for Free Online

chapters he had completed and threw them in the trash? What would he have thought of my husband, who reads in the sauna, where heat-fissioned pages drop like petals in a storm? What would he have thought (here I am making a brazen attempt to upgrade my family by association) of Thomas Jefferson, who chopped up a priceless 1572 first edition of Plutarch’s works in Greek in order to interleave its pages with an English translation? Or of my old editor Byron Dobell, who, when he was researching an article on the Grand Tour, once stayed up all night reading six volumes of Boswell’s journals and, as he puts it, “sucked them like a giant mongoose”? Byron told me, “I didn’t give a damn about the condition of those volumes. In order to get where I had to go, I underlined them, wrote in them, shredded them, dropped them, tore them to pieces, and did things to them that we can’t discuss in public.”
    Byron loves books. Really, he does. So does my husband, an incorrigible book-splayer whose roommate once informed him, “George, if you ever break the spine of one of my books, I want you to know you might as well be breaking
my own spine
.” So does Kim, who reports that despite his experience in Copenhagen, his bedside table currently supports three spreadeagled volumes. “They are ready in an instant to let me pick them up,” he explains. “To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you’ve only pressed Pause.” I confess to marking my place promiscuously, sometimes splaying, sometimes committing the even more grievous sin of dog-earing the page. (Here I manage to be simultaneously abusive and compulsive: I turn down the upper corner for page-marking and the lower corner to identify passages I want to xerox for my commonplace book.)
    All courtly lovers press Stop. My Aunt Carol—who will probably claim she’s no relation once she finds out how I treat my books—places reproductions of Audubon paintings horizontally to mark the exact paragraph where she left off. If the colored side is up, she was reading the left-hand page; if it’s down, the right-hand page. A college classmate of mine, a lawyer, uses his business cards, spurning his wife’s silver Tiffany bookmarks because they are a few microns too thick and might leave vestigial stigmata. Another classmate, an art historian, favors Paris Métro tickets or “those Inkjet-printed credit card receipts—but only in books of art criticism whose pretentiousness I wish to desecrate with something really crass and financial. I would never use those in fiction or poetry, which really
are
sacred.”
    Courtly lovers always remove their bookmarks when the assignation is over; carnal lovers are likely to leave romantic mementos, often three-dimensional and messy.
Birds of Yosemite and the East Slope
, a volume belonging to a science writer friend, harbors an owl feather and the tip of a squirrel’s tail, evidence of a crime scene near Tioga Pass. A book critic I know took
The Collected Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
on a backpacking trip through the Yucatan, and whenever an interesting bug landed in it, she clapped the covers shut. She amassed such a bulging insectarium that she feared Poe might not make it through customs. (He did.)
    The most permanent, and thus to the courtly lover the most terrible, thing one can leave in a book is one’s own words. Even I would never write in an encyclopedia (except perhaps with a No. 3 pencil, which I’d later erase). But I’ve been annotating novels and poems—transforming monologues into dialogues—ever since I learned to read. Byron Dobell says that his most beloved books, such as
The Essays of Montaigne
, have been written on so many times, in so many different periods of his life, in so many colors of ink, that they have become palimpsests. I would far rather read Byron’s copy of Montaigne than a virginal one from the