Book annotations (other ppl's, or even yr own)

Bought a copy of Ways of Seeing by John Berger for buttons the other day. The final printed page is blank apart from the line 'To be continued by the reader...'. Underneath, a previous owner of the book has written:

1) What a badly produced book. (And the author is said to be an artist.)
2) Text focused on author's political and social views.

More examples, please.

I've often considered starting a blog for this sort of thing, but haven't been able to find the ambition yet. I have a secondhand copy of A Tale of Two Cities that is full of bizarre annotations; I'll try to dig it out and share them this weekend.

i think the only book i own w/ any annotations in it is my copy of marianne moore's complete poems. the previous owner seems to have bought it for an undergrad poetry or lit class. only two or three poems have any annotation, though, and it's the kind of combo of obvious and overanalyzing that i feel like i always ended up w/ when a teacher asked me to annotate a poem

David Markson's library to thread

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/07/26/alex-abramovich/oh-i-get-it-its-a-sci-fi-novel/

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/07/david-marksons-library-for-sale.html

Think this was what I was looking for http://readingmarksonreading.tumblr.com/

irony.

bias.

in the part of 'utilitarianism' where mill goes on and on about how widely and deeply the spirit of utility could be inculcated into everyone and then breaks off with a little qualification about how there might be a threat to freedom and individuality

'jesus fucking christ, finally dude'

in the margin of a bit on the Lives of the saints in Religion and the Decline of Magic, possibly relating to the sentence "By the 12th and 13th centuries the Lives of the Saints had assumed a stereotyped pattern":

MF: B to Abo's A's contradict him, [?Mius ?throug] B[avius?] translation.

feel someone more well versed in the subject than me could have a stab at this. also someone who's a bit less stab-in-the-dark wrt palaeography.

photo!

(I don't think I'm well-versed enough fwiw)

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/213d5bd3-c898-444f-99bd-e03f35ae65eb_zpsac9d596a.jpg

found whoever's underlinings and marginalia in my copy of sebastian knight tremendously evocative. kept them in a file.

wonder if the spacing will work

theme: unattainable past
uses: 	(illegible)
		memory
	1
this pretense
						 he
						doesn't exist
					my country
	2
		image does not appear
blurred and displaced	she talked of my father's
	3
otiose: in practical use, useless
				so nugatory
					when we were along to-
gether I was painfully embarrassed.

wow. i also heavily annotated my copy of Sebastian Knight. Remains the Nabokov I got most into. I'm thinking that compiled they'd not be as poetically expressive as that though.

Religion and the Decline of Magic looks great. Would you recommend?

I was just eying books on the history of witchcraft in the library yesterday, without picking one out. My eye probably passed right over it.

yes, definitely. I mean, I haven't actually read it before, only dipped, but it's p much the key historical analysis on the topic (there are longer, comprehensive surveys, quite dull sometimes). You won't read any subsequent books on the subject that don't refer to it, and its general historiographic influence is quite extensive as well. Also Keith Thomas has a good academic style and a good eye for anecdotal detail - it's readable in other words.

no, i got nothing on the annotations.

R&TDoM a really great book imo, the best post-war book about early modern England I can think of, a really amazing accumulation of bits

it is bitty because it is made of bits of paper stuffed in envelopes

i've picked up various books on alchemy and kabbalah that are, perhaps appropriately, full of indecipherable scribbling (and a lot of underlining)

remember reading that article and understanding what he was saying, but just thinking "how the fuck did you ever write a book like that?"

otoh it's a nice clear answer to the question 'why have you only written 3 books in 40 years?'.

I once bought a copy of Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier" off the street for a buck without bothering to flip through it first. Looking at it later I realized it had been almost totally marked up with notes in the margins, almost all of which were just about how bad the reader thought the book was (e.g. "god, what a whiner"). Think I just threw it out because I didn't want that running commentary sullying (or even complementing) my reading of it

i really enjoy when you end up facing off against a contrary reading. i am the kind of person who reads every word of the introduction in a penguin classic before i start on the text, though.

50 pages in, Religion etc. is what I hoped it would be.

No intriguing annotations yet, just a moronic amount of underlining.

written on the very first page of my bf's secondhand copy of Logic by Wilfrid Hodges: "I hate logic, it makes no sense"

i was reading a used copy of tao lin's story collection "bed" and there was running commentary throughout the margins. mostly it said stuff like "this is a shitty story i can tell" and then a few pages later "i was right" and then later, "wtf was the deal with the little girl" idgi." after about 60 pages there were no more comments so i assume this person stopped reading. surprised they hung in that long.

i like reading my mom's college books, especially the poetry ones, because her commentary is so exhaustive and enthusiastic and i feel like i am communicating, somehow, with a younger version of her. she underlined and highlighted even more than i do... really dissected tintern abbey in an exhaustive manner.

once i picked up a copy of the collected john ashbery in a nj barnes and noble and lodged in the back of it was a folded piece of paper where someone had written a polemic against asbery's "meaningless" verse, and offered a defense of the "confessional" tradition in american poetry. i disagreed with every word of what he said but i love that stuff... connections forged between readers through marginal notes etc. i have more anecdotes about this kind of thing but i will stop.

One time I went to the Strand to get a copy of the subject of this thread Best Story in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964 (Unabridged Version) and inside the book, which had appeared more or less new, were a bunch of crib notes for a course, or a section of a course, on detective fiction. I've been meaning to post them one day.

that's the kind of thing i love: book annotations preserve traces of the past that otherwise would disappear, and they end up in the hands of unexpected people.

http://www.studentbeans.com/worldweirdweb/a/wins/22-geniously-defaced-textbooks-exam-papers4230.html

Picked up a copy of Octavio Paz's Double Flame. About half of it has gradually more angry and angrier marginalia. Total urge to kill rising mode as Paz mixes stuff that is learned and well-read (at least I was picking up thoughts to chew over every couple of pages of so) with utterly banal generalisations. Like half of his brain was damaged.

Anyway the margins took over and once we get into his "meditations" on contemporary matter annotations stop, and so did I. I was confident that the shit took over, totally trusted this person's judgement.

Almost too great, Ward! Wonder if some of it's done especially for a book--? What the hell, I'd buy (and add to)

I once borrowed a copy of a Danish book called something like 'Old Cars After the War' by Lars Frost. It's okay. Towards the end the narrator has this long rant about his experience as a guide in Africa, where he had sex with every member of a German family (the father might just have come on to him, but definitely the mom and the daughter). In the copy, someone had underlined every instance of the words 'dick' and 'pussy' (in Danish 'pik' and 'fisse'). It was quite visual, a lot of lines on each page.