Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman Read Free Book Online Page B

reduced circumstances meant asking your servants to plump chintz-covered cushions insted of satin ones? (I would have. I didn’t really deserve that 9 in Self-control.) Or was she in some way consoled?
    Father O’Reilly
, I think as I sit with my baby on one knee and a worn brown volume on the other,
you and I don’t exactly see eye to eye. But thanks for letting me get to know my great-grandmother
. And I tell him that someday I’ll ask my daughter what she sees reflected back when
she
looks into
The Mirror of True Womanhood
. She’ll have plenty to go on, since she’ll inherit her great-great-grandmother’s book the week her first child is born.

 W O R D S  O N  A  F L Y L E A F  
    L ong ago, when George and I were not yet lovers but seemed to be tottering in that general direction, we gave each other our first Christmas presents. Of course, they were books. Knowing that I liked bears, George gave me
The Biography of a Grizzly
, by Ernest Thompson Seton. Modestly sequestered on the third page was the following inscription:
To a new true friend
. No Talmudic scholar, no wartime cryptographer, no deconstructionist critic ever scrutinized a text more closely than I did those five words, hoping that if they were just construed with the right emphasis (“To a
new
true friend.” “To a new
true
friend.” “To a new true
friend
“), they would suddenly reveal themselves as a declaration of undying devotion.
    Knowing that George liked fish, I gave him
Old Mr. Flood
, by Joseph Mitchell, a slim volume of stories about the Fulton Fish Market. The author had autographed the book himself in 1948, but did I leave well enough alone? Of course not. I wrote:
To George, with love from Anne
. Then I mistranscribed a quotation from Red Smith. And finally—on the principle that if you don’t know what to say, say everything—I added fifteen lines of my own reflections on the nature of intimacy. My cumulative verbiage, not to mention the patency of my sentiments, exceeded George’s by a factor of approximately twenty to one. It’s a miracle that the book, its recipient, and the new true friendship weren’t all crushed under the weight of the inscription.
    Unfortunately—since George married me anyway and has retained his affection for both fish and Joseph Mitchell—rny words were preserved for good. Unlike the card that accompanies, say, a sweater, from which it is soon likely to part company, a book and its inscription are permanently wedded. This can be either a boon or a blot. As Seumas Stewart, the proprietor of an antiquarian bookshop in Chipping Camden, Gloucestershire, has observed, “Imagine how delightful it would be to own an edition of Thomson’s
The Seasons
with this authenticated inscription:
To my dear friend John Keats in admiration and gratitude, from P. B. Shelley, Florence, 1820
. Imagine, too, how depressing to have an otherwise fine first of Milton’s
Paradise Lost
with this ball-point inscription scrawled on the title page:
To Ada from Jess, with lots of love and candy floss, in memory of a happy holiday at Blackpool, 1968
.”
    My inscription, a specimen of the candy-floss school, did not improve
Old Mr. Flood
in the same way that, for example,
To Miss Elizabeth Barrett with the Respects of Edgar Allan Poe
improved
The Raven and Other Poems
, or
Hans Christian Andersen / From his friend and admirer Charles Dickens / London July 1847
improved
The Pickwick Papers
. In the bibliomane’s hierarchy, such holy relics of literary tangency eclipse all other factors: binding, edition, rarity, condition. “The meanest, most draggle-tailed, foxed, flead, dog’s-eared drab of a volume” (as the critic and bibliophile Holbrook Jackson once wrote) is instantly transfigured by an inscription with a sufficiently distinguished pedigree. Whose hands could fail to tremble while holding the well-worn copy of
Corinne
, by Madame de Staël, on whose flyleaf Byron wrote a 226-word mash note to the Marchesa