Of Marking Books

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

Society is curiously organized. I may not force my friendship upon an acquaintance; yet, forsooth, I may without a qualm intrude myself in a far more serious way upon an utter stranger. If I were to go, day in and day out, to the home of a man I barely knew, I should see but the surface of him, should annoy him doubtless, but only annoy him; while if I mark a library book it were as if I pulled its reader from the very depths of thought, and forced him to regard me, — little trivial me. When one reads Meredith he would not commune with John Smith, — yet here, turning up every few pages, is the indefatigable Smith, with perchance a little comment on the style, or a neatly worded phrase on how much Meredith reminds him of Kipling, with now a correction of spelling in Diana and now a pregnant exclamation mark at a typographical error in Bhauavar the Beautiful. Oh, the deep-dyed soul of a man that could observe a misspelled word in a fairy tale! Indeed, I often wonder what manner of creature John Smith may be. I picture him as a kind of ghoul, wandering at his red-mouthed leisure through a book, ferreting out dead words, wounded sentences. Methinks I almost hear the cries of the disabled phrases as he pounces ogrelike upon them. Clearly he seeks little flaws (I have not misjudged him in that) for otherwise he would read, not Meredith, but Tarbell’s English Grammar.

Religiously I erase Mr. John Smith — for he is pretty much always in pencil; still I read only two or three books a week, and there are upwards of half a million volumes in the Boston Public Library!

But, indeed, why mark books at all — even one’s own ? Mark your books of science all you please; they are chill, lifeless things; but not your own books that you love, for I tell you they have souls, and a vast deal nobler than yours or mine, most likely. After all, what is the use of it? Marking prose is ridiculous; one does not look through a novel for passages he has marked, unless out of sheer pedantry, that he may quote them brilliantly to his friends; for honest quotations are those that stick in your mind willy-nilly, not those that are learned by rote, like Horatius at the Bridge. And as for marking verse, is not that equally inane ? Surely there is no line or word in your most sacred poems that you cannot turn to instantly without the vulgar aid of pencilmarks ?

Alas, I fear that we do not mark books for ourselves, but for others. One marks books, as, were he a bit more naïve in character, he might leave the Bible lying open on the table when the minister called.