May
20
♥ marginalia
This is a snobby blog about the hilarious notes and drawings left in books. We swear we're not horrible people. We just read a lot and can't afford to buy our own shiny new books.
If you have something to share, email pictures to notesinbooks at gmail dot com.
Billy Joe Hickorystick on communism…
This one is strangely appropriate to current events (see: Obama is a socialist, Tea Parties, etc.)! While reading a 1964 edition of the Communist Manifesto I checked out of a small-town Indiana library, I came across some old marginalia that, I’m sure, is the result of that one mind-fatiguing time Billy Joe Hickorystick tried perusing something other than his usual read (singular; i.e. not the Bible).
Funnily, the notes don’t begin until about halfway through the text, when on page 30 Billy Joe mysteriously and suddenly lashes out by striking through parts of a sentence and substituting his own words. Where the original once read, “You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property,” Billy Joe writes, “YES FREE PEOPLE ARE horrified [bold stands in for heavy underlining] at ‘our’ COMMUNIST intending to do away with private property [italics stand in for neutral underlining].” Gee, I think that reading of the text is unique and original, Billy Joe. Good job at putting it in more easily understood terms!
He also helps us out by writing such useful notes as, “TRUE!” “LIE!” “NOT SO!” “NOT IN AMERICA!” and “ONLY WHERE GOD IS PRESENT!” Other gems include numerous exclamation points in random places and wild underlining of phrases such as “mode of production” “proletariat” “revolutionizing” and “degrees.”
Thank you, Billy Joe Hickorystick. I really needed that laugh. Photographs of my favorite “helpful notes” to follow…
May
8
Re: pre-reading
I went to a Denis Johnson reading the other day. He read prose and poetry. He introduced one of his poems by saying that he had found the book in a used bookstore in Austin, and somebody had annotated the poems in the book. He was so annoyed by the annotations that he bought the book. The pre-reader had in fact crossed out sections of the poem and wrote “dull” by other sections. Denis Johnson kept interrupting himself while he was reading, pointing out these critical annotations, reading a line and stopping and saying, “This part is dull.” Or, about the second line: “This got an exclamation point! It’s the only part they liked.”
He finally admitted, “I’m going to end up ruining the reading of this poem, but I really hate this person.”
