Bibliomemory

What's this got to do with food? Nothing. But even a food geek needs to take a break and be multi-dimensional...

A few weeks ago, I pulled an old copy of a favorite book from my shelf and laid it on my nightstand with intent to read it -- unfortunately, I was experiencing the book version of "never shop when you're hungry." Instead of one book, I ended up with six or seven, so this particular book ended up on the bottom of the heap.

Last night, I pulled it out. The book is Jean Paul Sartre's Les Jeux Sont Faits which is about the futility of life and love, made all the more appropriate by the inscription on the front page from my sister Kelly: Dear Ki, May you trample over many people in the course of your life...especially men. December, 1992.

I love marginalia - reading it, and writing it. I know this horrifies book lovers who prefer the unsullied perfection of a book which bears no marks, but my books are littered with scribblings and so much the better: having previously treasured the pristine virginality of my books, I began despoiling them about seven years ago in order to make the experience a mutual, rather than a one-sided, conversation. (In case you didn't know, marching your thoughts alongside those of the author's is indicative of narcissistic egomania.)

But I love inscriptions best because then there is a third voice involved in my reading. And those other voices recall a moment in time with consomme clarity. It was as if my sister's remarks were an incantantion for time travel. I could remember where we bought the book (Schoenhopf's Foreign Books, in Georgetown, on P Street) and how she would not let me have it until Christmas, which was two weeks hence. I know what pen she used to inscribe the book because I watched her do it: a marble green Waterman Harmonie fountain pen. I even remember that at the time, our relationship was slightly better than Joan Fontaine's and Olivia de Havilland's (they were both actresses and sisters; when Olivia presented Joan with an award one evening, her commentary was: "Ugh.").

It's a powerful thing: to read a living memory. A dear friend once gave me the "Velveteen Rabbit" when I was at the height of my cynicism about all things love, and queried on the front page: "Perhaps love isn't something you feel...but something you grow into, when someone loves you?"

My cousin Wendy introduced me to her friend John not too long ago. John and I talked about our mutual bibliomania. Then he told me a story about how he recently pulled out an old book that he had not read for some fifteen years. Halfway through the book, he found a love note inscribed to him by his then-girlfriend. At the time, he had already read past the page on which she had written her note, so it required him reading the book again to find it. Fifteen years later, it was an epistolary Easter egg which transported him.

"Everything about her came back in a rush," he said. "The way she looked, the way she smelled, the way I felt about her. It was as if she left me a wormhole to go back to that moment with her."

Of all the inscribed books on my shelf, the one I love the most is written in my copy of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It was written with my beloved Parker 51 fountain pen (on loan), the author sitting next to me in the passenger seat of my mother's Avalon at the intersection of Constitution and 10th in Washington, DC on June 27, 2000. That's pretty specific. It should be: the author in question is now my husband.

(originally posted June 9, 2004)