The Istoriaphile’s Corner

I still remember the first time I saw it.  I was browsing through a used book store and re-reading The Great Gatsby for pleasure, (hey, you have your pleasures, I have mine) when I saw it at the end of Chapter three.   Someone had underlined the last sentence in the paragraph and drawn a star beside it at the end. They wrote in a book.  A book full of someone else’s words.  I wasn’t aware people did that. Not that my family tried to safeguard our books; you can’t safeguard possessions you love and use daily. Our books were tattooed with coffee-cup stains, dog-eared and limp with wear.  A few loved storybooks suffered with fractured spines and key pages had to be turned carefully.  We were hard on the books we loved, but we never wrote on their pages. I bought the used book, partly because I love the story  and partly because I was curious about the previous owner’s additions.  The check marks and dashes seemed like someone else’s coded commentary that expanded my vision of the story.  I wanted to decipher the code. I never quite succeeded in that but I learned why some folk annotate text: they…