Marginalia

papersky recently linked to a post about someone who had written in a library copy of her novel Farthing.

I must confess that I find it very difficult to write in books, even when they're my own property. The idea of writing in someone else's book, still more of writing in a library book, fills me with horror. I remember one such graffito I found in a library copy of Anthony Trollope's The Warden. The writer, apparently, took exception to the idea of the immortality of the soul. The propriety of inserting such an objection in a book whose central characters are nineteenth-century Anglican clergy and their families, a book which concerns itself with questions of wordly morality and ecclesiastical politics and not at all with questions of the afterlife, is at best arguable; but let me set before you the original passage, and the objection.

The marriage took place at the palace, and the bishop himself officiated. It was the last occasion on which he ever did so; and though he still lives, it is not probable that he will ever do so again.

The marginal comment: "Live again? It is, empirically speaking, not likely!"

A little literacy, please?