April 18, 2004

• incredible link, plep and i offer you a first edition of a vintage book on bananas. since there is a large and progressive arts community here, as well as a wonderful library system that i am a devotee of, i quickly sent this on to the chief librarian. i hope she sees some merit to it. / i hate finding people's comments and spelling corrections in books.
• Great story, thanks for pointing it out, plep!
• awesome. Good find, plep.
• Beautiful. We'll never know why he did it, I guess. People with violent hatreds that they refuse to admit to or or discuss frighten me a great deal.
• I liked these two. It's a shocking story - the systematic torture of these books. I'm glad that the library could make some step towards defying that act. Much less shocking but still interesting is the Cambridge University Library's attempt to educate its users about Marginalia and other crimes. (Yes, marginalia is definately a crime when any library book is involved, let alone a copyright library.)
• This is the feel-good post of the week if not the month! Thanks plep! In line with everyone else when I say that Darcy Hunter's "For Duf" is marvelous.
• I remember the first time my department found a mutilated book after I started work there. The whole department huddled around the book in silence for almost a minute. It was like looking at a murder victim. The poor thing had entire chapters cut out, leaving a rectangle of paper to fool the observer that it was still intact.
• I used to work for the county library service round here (although I never worked in the actual libraries). The people who were most likely to vandalise books were the pensioners, who'd sit down and black out all the swear words in novels...
• Dear Mary, I yearn for you tragically. A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, US Army.
• Superlative post with art triumphant -- really like Blackbird Singing. Thanks, plep.