७ जून, २०२१

At the Newark Public Library, you can see a display of almost 4,000 books from Philip Roth's personal library....

"... including a four-volume set about the history of presidential elections, multiple copies of Kafka’s 'The Trial' and a marked-up edition of 'Incredible iPhone Apps for Dummies.'"

 According to "Look Inside Philip Roth’s Personal Library/The author of 'Goodbye, Columbus' and 'The Human Stain' left several thousand books, many of them with notes or letters, to the Newark Public Library." 

I love the high-low juxtaposition of "The Trial" and "Incredible iPhone Apps for Dummies." 

And I love that there's lots of marginalia. (You may remember that marginalia was the subject of the first post on this blog, on January 14, 2004.) 

There are some nice photographs at the link, such as the one of Roth's copy of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" — with Post-It notes and an underline sentence: "'Life,' said Emerson, 'consists in what a man is thinking all day.'"

In that first blog post of mine, I said, among other things, "I do like writing in the margins of books, something I once caused a librarian to gasp by saying." Having made a librarian gasp, I'm pleased to see this Newark library constructing a shrine to marginalia.

1 टिप्पणी:

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

Ernest writes:

"If I want to absorb a book I will make marks in the margins and sometimes notes. If a writer is making a series of points over several pages, I often will numerate each succeeding point in the margin. This is why I prefer printed books over electronic media. I own a Kindle but rarely use it. I might pick it up again once I start flying again, especially on those long trans-Pacific flights. Marking up books (that I own, of course) helps me to digest what the writer is trying to convey.

"On the other hand, when buying used books, I try to avoid heavily marked up ones. Those represent someone else’s thought process about the text – not mine."