Having listened with half an ear this morning to Richard Coles, JP Devlin, et al. discuss the superiority of paper books with Margaret Mountford (of Apprentice fame) on Saturday Live, perhaps I was extra alert today for some love token to mark my long histoire d'amour with the book.
Margaret Mountford, as you may have been able to guess, is also a fan of the book - and made an interesting observation about not being able to remember so much when she reads text on a screen; her brain is trained to remember that something is at the top of the left-hand page, etc. - and I think mine is too. It transpires that Margaret gave up the glamours of meting out judgement to Bright Young Tycoons to complete a PhD in Papyrology - she had been doing it part-time and wanted to complete it within the allotted time without having to request an extension (these rather mundane details fascinate me - I do wonder how many other successful corporate lawyers would display her genteel attitude to education).
Well, the books decided to remind me why I love them this evening, with the above epistle from an old copy of Santayana...
Just as I love reading "Acknowledgements" sections, I also find inscriptions and bookplates fascinating; I never erase or cross out the names of those who have previously owned my books - instead I add my own - and I hate being given a book with a blank front page (the legacy of a family who would scrawl and draw long dedicatory inscriptions on every book we gave) -- and to the man who once RIPPED OUT the front pages of all of the books I had left in his house, because my name was written on them: there is a particularly unpleasant corner of purgatory reserved especially for you.
One of my favourites is a copy of Isadora Duncan's autobiography which was once owned by Corin Redgrave, and I found out about a whole set of mid-century Cambridge feminists all because one of them had once owned my Edna St. Vincent Millay "Conversation at Midnight. Tonight, however, I was re-reading Santayana's "Genteel Tradition" and - procrastinating but also interested - decided to look up the "Lionel Cuffie" of Harvard who had previously owned my copy. Was he now a writer himself? - or an academic, or lawyer, or politician? - for a man who had been at Harvard forty years ago, the possibilities seemed endless.
The answer, unfortunately, was none of these: Lionel Cuffie died in 1985, from AIDS. He did, however, do remarkable things: in 1969 he founded the "Rutgers Student Homophile League" (only the second student organisation for gay men and women in the US): "I founded the league on impulse from my conscience, I thought it was my moral duty
to bring other people to the same realizations that I had come to over
the summer -- that we, as homosexuals, are an oppressed minority."
