JOHN THE
OBSCURE ™
By John Ruch
©
2007
The
Shadow Library
There are worse crimes than
underlining words in library books, but they all involve nuclear weapons.
This sort of vandalism is in a way
worse than murder, because many people see nothing wrong with it and no culprit
ever gets punished. A ninja SWAT team should crash through the skylight of
anyone aiming a pink highlighter at a book they do not own.
Marginalia in a book is like someone
talking during a movie. Underscoring is like obnoxious movie product
placements. (I’ve actually had people challenge my opposition to product
placements, to which I merely reply, “Oh PEPSI, you mean PEPSI product
placements PEPSI don’t bother PEPSI you PEPSI?”)
The severity of my opinion in this
matter makes Torquemada look like a freethinking waffler.
But recently I was watching the bibliomane flick “
My feeling was that Anne was full of
crap. But now I wasn’t totally sure. I liked the movie’s
underlining-as-the-unconscious idea. And really, there wasn’t conflict per
se—the movie was most likely referring to personal tomes from personal
libraries. I certainly enjoy reading marginalia from the libraries of famous
people; I’ve even done pretty good mark-ups of some of my own books as well (at
least one of which, filled with my red-ink excoriations about inaccuracies in a
recounting of Jack the Ripper’s crimes, went into the trash a few years ago and
may now be in circulation somewhere). But if there’s validity to that view, it
must carry over into at least some public library book vandalism. Somewhere
among those pencil-skritching little criminals there
must be at least one Scarlet Pimpernel, a true Romantic revealing a lush inner
soul with an ephemeral gesture left at the scene.
I decided to put my opinion to the
test and spent two nights yanking random books off the shelves at the Boston
Public Library (BPL).
Gracefully opening before me like a
black tulip was an entire shadow library, a wealth of annotations and
marginalia, underscorings and weird forgotten
bookmarks, cryptic markings and rhetorical arguments—enough editorial
commentary to fill many books in itself. Most of it was hardly the stuff of
romance, but there was something generally romantic about discovering, or
acknowledging, this secret library-within-the-library.
And I’ll give it to “
The BPL’s circulating fiction stacks
aren’t a romantic place—more like a badly carpeted Wal-Mart or the bunk room of
a new county jail. But it was magic enough, finding that line and its
importance to someone, while the window blinds rippling in the forced-air
heaters made a sound like a mountain stream.
This seeming confirmation of the “84
Charing” worldview got me hooked and kept me motivated—which
was good, because things rapidly got bad from there.
Because the thing is, I was right,
at least on a percentage basis. The vast majority of underlinings
are part of a vast majority of underlinings—not a
sole magical sentence palinquined to the foreground,
but page after page slash-marked as if by Jack the Ripper, obviously by a real
or would-be student. Typically they are accompanied by drastically obvious
margin notes: “he is realizing what is going on that he is going to be arrested” in Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” or “IRONIC” in Upton Sinclair’s “
A subset of this quasi-personal
underlining is the Unfamiliar Word effect, illustrated by whoever marked the
words “inured” and “oleaginous” in a translation of “Crime and Punishment.”
The remaining handful
of truly personal vandalisms often have the nasty, sweaty air of madness
to them. They did not make me think wistfully of a former reader sitting on a
window bench in some English manor, smiling and nodding at the line in time to
my own heart. They made think I’m glad I didn’t meet them in a dark alley.
In its crudest form, this involves
true graffiti, like the copy of Walter Henry Nelson and Terence Prittie’s “The Economic War Against
the Jews” with “Good that’s what they deserve! All against Jewish imperialism!”
scrawled on the first blank page (and later scribbled over by someone else). In
my unrepresentative sampling, scolding marginalia seemed especially the
province of right-wing crackpots.2
Another example: in the inherently
nutty Catholic book “Survival Till Seventeen: Some Portraits of Early Ideas” by
Leonard Feeney only one line was underscored: “Co-education after fourteen is a
farce. There is a world for woman and a world for man, and you will confound
the two at your peril.” (Or at your leisure at Jacques,
Besides that underlining, there were
two really weird pieces of marginalia in that book, consisting of the repeating
of words in descending lines, with each subsequent word increasingly running
off the edge of the page. The words were “compassion” and “rhythm.”
The realm of rhetorical marginalia
did include one example more in accordance with my own opinions (and reality),
though it’s not quite what “84 Charing” had in mind.
In Tipper Gore’s infamous rock-censorship book “Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated
Society” someone opined: “Can you blame this on the media”; “No”; “The
constitution does not have anything to do with responsibility in such
matters.”; “Isn’t that what made
In this most literal questioning of
authority we can see a proto-wiki urge and much of what has given the Web and
talk radio their popularity—and insanity.
Perhaps the strangest of these
amateur annotators was the one who provided a categorical index to their own
vandalism on the last page of Louisa Luna’s “Crooked.” The reader put brackets
in the margins around various paragraphs, which keyed to this index:
“12) Liquor
24) Abuse [scratched out] Violence
29) Liquor
36) Abuse [scratched out]
39) Violence
40) Violence
46) Violence
93) Abuse [underlined]”
Just for the record, they missed the
liquor on page 218. (As you can see, I understand how hard it is not to leave a
comment of one’s own.)
A similar master of internal logic
went to work on a copy of W.H. Auden’s “The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays.”
There were various obscure little marks throughout the text. Under a paragraph
that says Sloth and Cowardice, rather than Gluttony and Lust, are the “most
‘fleshly’” of the sins, the marginalist wrote, “So you
say—my friend!”
And then, on the table of contents
page, was written the following:
“sacred profane
giggle laugh
wish desire
[illegible] [illegible]
virgin dynamo
serial prosper
Alexandria Xandie
[this word unclear and circled]
Toshi
[this word unclear]
Eden/N
Arcadia/Utopian”
Granted, this gives me a glimpse
into a psyche passing in the night. But it’s not like reading an old book
shipped from
A lighter version of the
pathological list was found in a copy of Jacob Needleman’s “The New Religions.”
The text contained several hash marks and a small heart drawn next to a passage
about Jesus. And then, on the last blank page:
“acceptance
love
joy
compassion
gratitude
awareness
completeness”
They left out “defacement,” but
perhaps it was implied.
Other possible examples of the
personal touch are more ambiguous or even arcane. In two cases, only one line
was underscored in the book, but they were in works of non-fiction, suggesting
they could be the work of a student targeting a core theme instead of slashing
their way through the whole thing.
One example was Joseph Rychlak’s “Discovering Free Will and Personal
Responsibility” (not subtitled “Which Does Not Include Vandalizing Books”): “…determinism, because insofar as a
behavior is determined it has had limitations put upon the alternatives to
which it might be open.”
The other example was in Martin
Marty’s “A Short History of Christianity”: “But the fourth century was given
two momentous tasks: to hold the monotheism that Christianity professed, and
yet make room for the work of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (the trinitarian solution) and for a divine and human nature in
Christ.”
Then there was the realm of the
truly cryptic. Underlinings in Imre
Kovács’ “The Ninety and Nine,” a 1955 novel about
priests vs. Commies behind the Iron Curtain, suggest a literal code involving
only singular or paired words: “smoking”; “Number”; “Number Two”; “God”; “He
too”; “He saw”; “held”; “young zealots.” Combined with the ancient computer
punch card held in a pocket inside its back cover, such underscores gave the
book the freaky air of something a spy would hide in a pumpkin.5 The
almost random nature suggests a mnemonic device, a kind of internal bookmark,
but some of the words were buried in the middle of sentences.
The underlining of “…is
aristocratic” in John Pendleton Kennedy’s “Swallow Barn; or, A Sojourn in the
Old Dominion” is similarly mysterious. Does it mark a stopping point? Did the
reader not know the word “aristocratic”?
Indeed, in many books the markings
were themselves ambiguous—little hashes something like quote marks, or half-circlings trailing comet tails. I only recorded solid underlinings (or sometimes brackets if they were linked to
marginalia), because it was uncertain what other kinds of marks referred to.
But perhaps those are the truly romantic marks, the ones where not only the
reader, but the emotion, are left only as unknowable adumbrations.
Whatever their nature, most underlinings/marginalia were done in pencil—an implied
acknowledgement of shame with a built-in rationalization that someone could
later erase it all, though of course no one ever does. The use of pen (and even
highlighters) was far more common in non-fiction, as was the urge to correct or
argue. Underlinings in general were more common in
the studious world of non-fiction, so much so that I finally gave up recording
them unless they were enjoyably weird.
It’s pretty clear that “84 Charing” was being mushheaded and
at best not wholly truthful (or relevant only to a book-selling system in which
only very small, poignant underlinings can slip
through quality control). But it wasn’t wrong. These markings do fossilize
moments of emotional significance, even if they’re rarely the preferred emotion
of romantic bibliophiles. Collectively, this shadowbrary
creates and reveals a context for the library, that sentiment that makes us so
personally attached to books that we can’t resist dialoguing with them, even
when they’re not ours. The existence of a public library tells us much about
the prestige of words; the existence of this shadow library tells us much about
the power of words.
This relationship between printed
word and written mark is as complex as any human one. Fiction books are less
marked, indicating less scrutiny, more acceptance; and when they are marked,
more gently so. Non-fiction is approached less respectfully but with more
engagement, more confrontation, more willingness to permanently alter with a
tattoo rather than a cosmetic.
“84 Charing”
was dead right about nostalgic ephemera in another way that it didn’t mention
and I naively didn’t foresee: the flock of impromptu bookmarks that fluttered
out of books like blue morphos from a jungle.
These are the truly romantic ghosts
of the shadow library’s anarchive—physical artifacts
the most ridiculous of which still drip with poignancy. They are little scraps
of people’s lives that weren’t so unimportant as to be thrown away, but
insignificant enough to become forgotten bookmarks. They are instances of life
and book meshing. They are intensely personal hints about what the reader had
close at hand, individual samples of the documentary aura that surrounds us
all.6
OK, a paper napkin folded into
quarters and adhering slightly to the book is a bit too personal. But still.7
Some of the bookmarks were in books
that also had underscoring or marginalia, raising the tantalizing possibility
they are all artifacts of the same reader. As with the vandalistic markings,
the bookmarks seemed generally more personal in tone in fiction books, more
anonymous—newspaper scraps and the like—in the non-. Unlike the markings, the
bookmarks lack intent and hence possess still more meaning. And they had an
inverse ratio of appearance to the markings, showing up far more frequently in
fictional books. For the average reader, fiction is the friend and non-fiction
is the teacher, relationships demarcated by quantity and quality of bookmarks.
They’re extraordinarily lively
things. I took them home like kittens. I feel like maybe I should return them
to the wild—or to the asylum.
There’s no catalogue to the shadow
library. You have to wait for it to come to you, or add to it yourself by
design or by accident. Here are the pages that came my way:
“1)
2) Echo & the
B men: The Killing Moon
3) Modest Mouse:
Polar Opposites
4) Morrissey: Suedehead
5) Neil Young:
Helpless
6) Velvet
Underground: Heroin
7) New Order:
Turn My Way
8) NIN: Hurt 9) Oasis:
Supersonic
10) Ted Leo: Biomusicology
11) Ride: Vapour Trail
12) Stones:
Sympathy for the Devil
13) Siouxise [sic] & the Banshees: Spellbound
14) Wilco: Heavy Metal Drummer [arrow to other side]
[back side of note]
15) The Smiths:
There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”
“Date
2 spaces
Mr./Mrs.
_______
_______
_______
2 spaces
Dear Sir/Madame:
1. _______
_______
_______
2 spaces
_______
_______
_______
2 spaces
Sincerly [sic],
3 spaces
[name withheld]”
“45:22 2:6 [in blue ink, scratched out with black ink
in which the rest is written]
24:15 1:5
31:40 1:7”
1
For the record, here are representative samples of underlining/marginalia from
multiply marked books I don’t quote elsewhere:
“Famous Ghost Stories,” Bennett Cerf, ed.: “…the old gray
“As I Lay Dying,” William Faulkner: “I knew that as plain
on that day as I knew about Dewey Dell on the day.”
“The Secret Goldfish: Stories,” David Means: “…the
double-jointed way it could defy itself.” Marginalia: “Back to Past.”
“The Last Hurrah,” Edwin O’Connor: “…not a bum in town…”
“
“The Philosophy of Plotinus,” Joseph Katz, trans.: “To
grasp the oneness…”
“Georg Lukács: The Man, His Work and His Ideas,” G.H.R. Parkinson, ed.:
“…lyrical-subjective and the epic-objective in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.” Marginalia: “Lookup” on a much-asterisked
bibliography page.
“The Beautiful, The Sublime, & The Picturesque in
Eighteenth Century British Aesthetic Theory,” Walter John Hipple
Jr.: “Ambition, finally, may join with the selfish passions concerned with
self-preservation to produce the sublime:…”
Marginalia: “beauty is not sexual in nature.”
“The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in
the United States,” Michael Kammen, ed.: “Interest in
the history of ordinary people was sustained throughout the 1970s…”
“Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the
National Security State,” Daniel Yergin: “He had
never forgiven the Bolsheviks for making their revolution, and retained an
implacable hatred of the Soviet Union and communism.”
“White and Coloured: The Behavior of British People Towards Coloured
Immigrants,” Michael Banton: “The maintenance of
social distance is customary; it is not necessarily actuated…”
“King George VI: His Life and Reign,” John W.
Wheeler-Bennett: “…in the unconquerable spirit of the British peoples.”
“Charles X of France: His Life and
Times,” Vincent W. Beach: Index entries, mostly about the king himself.
“City of Constantine,” John E.N. Hearsey:
“…old pagan Roman Empire died violently and convulsively, with four emperors
fighting for the right to rule, the centre of attention and also of
geographical importance shifted from Italy to the meeting place of Europe and
Asia. At Adrianople in A.D. 324 Constantine the Great defeated his last rival, Licinius, who made his way to Byzantium and across the Bosphorus to Chrysopolis.”
“Angela’s Ashes,” Frank McCourt: “…stairs to the next
part of my life.”
2 The same might be said for collectors of
marginalia. The only library that I am aware of that systematically and
habitually pays attention to marginalia is that of the Supermax
federal prison in Florence, Colorado, where Westerns and romance novels are reviewed
for messages or codes between prisoners. (Source: “Reporters get first look
inside mysterious Supermax prison” by Terry Frieden, Sept. 14, 2007, www.cnn.com.)
3 Shortly after publishing this column, I
coincidentally learned that Feeney was the founder of a New Hampshire-based
Catholic cult called the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I found it on
the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Dirty Dozen” list of anti-Semitic Catholic
organizations (a term the center does not consider tautological).
4 Incidentally, Al Gore, who aided Tipper’s
mania by holding a chilling-effect congressional hearing on rock censorship, is
now organizing a gigantic environmentalist pop concert. Perhaps the couple can
take the stage, preferably while wearing sparking sawblade
codpieces, to apologize to bands such as Metallica and the Dead Kennedys that
Tipper’s book excoriated despite (or because of) their expressing exactly her
politics, except with more anger, intelligence and in many ways effectiveness.
5 I have long wished to send a library
computer punch card to a dead-media expert with a challenge of “Hack this!”
This wish dates to the discovery of one such card after a friend and I scammed
our way into a college library in a fruitless, and inexplicable, attempt to
find a yearbook photo of Steve Albini.
6 The surprise of the bookmarks and their
unexpected connection to my romantic quest are typical of libraries, the sort
of spontaneous joy that is now delivered at warp speed by Web hyperlinks. There
was another example: In my shelf-pluckings, I came
across a book by Isak Dinesen, who I’d never heard of
before (despite her famous movie-adapted novels), and thought I should read it.
I then was flipping through a book of ghost stories and found underlined
passages; the story was by Dinesen. Then I later grabbed a book either by or
about Dinesen in the literary criticism section. “Browsing” is a word that has
been seized by the Internet, but the pleasures of the analog version should not
be forgotten. (“84 Charing” itself contained a
reference that was an interesting coincidence with my life; a bizarre allusion
to the painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who I had
researched a month earlier.)
It was fruitful to bring such a pointless frame of
reference to book-examining. Very little of my madness refined into method,
beyond my learning that the crappiest-looking copies of older books seemed to
be the best graffiti terrain. Other than that, I merely eyeballed for curves or
colors, regularly fooled by oval or scrolled chapter headings and the like.
Investigating books, like reading books, is about briefly adopting a particular
point of view; in this case, the field of vision was so broad, I was able to
leisurely observe many tangential details, such as my love for cheesy genre
stickers, like the big question mark for mysteries, on the spines of library
books.
7 I didn’t archive that, nor
another one of those John Dishwasher
ads I found in a copy of “The Dubliners.”
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