Comments on: Do you Pencil when you Read?

By: Arthur Durkee

Arthur Durkee — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:14:37 +0000

Oh that’s easy: I just copy those out into a journal, or something. Easier to re-find that way, too.

By: Nigel Beale

Nigel Beale — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:51:40 +0000

Arthur, I’m surprised. What about all the choice phrases and sublime lines in fiction and poetry??

By: Arthur Durkee

Arthur Durkee — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:54:56 +0000

I hate highlighters. I pencil in the margins, I make notes, I write responses, and I dog-ear the pages.But I don’t do it in every book. Some books that I revere I have two copies of, one a preserved hardcover and the other a marked-up paperback. The issue of reselling a book you love to re-read is irrelevant. Most of the books I’ve really marked up are ones I regularly buy multiple copies of to give away, anyway. The books I mark up are mine, and not going to be sold. I don’t mark up library books; if I feel the need, I find my own copy. So I have a rather large library, ah well.Also, I mostly mark up non-fiction, especially the books on theology and spiritual matters and philosophy that I read. I don’t find the need to ever mark up fiction or poetry.

By: Book Calendar

Book Calendar — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 22:19:08 +0000

Arg! This habit drives me crazy. Pencilling and underlining in books makes them defaced. It is very hard to resell a book that has been written in so someone else can use it.
Also if you collect books, it makes them valueless.
I find people pencilling in library books and it is very frustrating. It means we have to reorder the books, or discard them most of the time.
I can sort of understand if you are doing it for a very specific reason, but otherwise no.

By: Jake

Jake — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 17:37:00 +0000

I write in my books, and I even wrote about writing in my books in response to John Lancaster in the LBR. To me, writing in my books is a record of what I thought as well as a source of ideas in the future. It's not uncommon for me to remember a vivid or important section of a book and flip through it, looking for highlights. Now that I've started grad school, that's become more important, since it's not uncommon for me to need material or ideas for papers. In two weeks I'm supposed to give a talk in Seattle, and I spent a fair amount of yesterday looking through books for tidbits that were on my mind, and the highlights/writing helped me enormously. Granted. someday I might look back and think, "What an idiot." But so what? At least I'll have something to react against. In thinking about this post, I'm going back to a section of Wood's How Fiction Works because I remember a passage about this subject. I can't find it because I know I didn't highlight it, and eventually I find it on page 53 of the British edition:

"You have only to teach literature to realise that most young readers are poor noticers. I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated twenty years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details that strike me now as commonplace, while serenely missing things which now seem wonderful."
Oh well. I guess that's the danger, but if so, it's one I walk blithely into.

By: Legendumst

Legendumst — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 09:46:38 +0000

I used to be strongly opposed to pen and pencil marks (let alone the dreaded highlighters), but eventually my concern for a book’s appearance gave way to my concern for its content, and since my memory is dismal, marks have become an indispensable aide to my reading. I stick to pencil — a Sensa Classic Carbon Black, to be precise — but even so I shun underlining whenever possible, instead marking important passages with a vertical line in the margin. Sometimes, however, underlining is inevitable, and I have come to abhor reading on trains because a neat underline on a train ride is a nigh-impossible feat.I am so accustomed to reading with a pencil that nowadays I consider it almost disrespectful to a book if I do not to take notes of some kind. Then again, some books are so beautiful or valuable in their appearance that I dare not defile them with marks, and such books necessitate that I buy, in addition, a cheaper edition specifically for marking.Shelf-labelling, on the other hand, seems to go against my reading habits. I like to think of shelving as a dynamic process: books peregrinate from shelf to shelf, desk to desk, pile to pile. (On second thought, I might be unwilling to admit that some of my books, like forsaken friends, languish in a dusty corner, forgotten and unread; perhaps shelving according to last-read to most-recently-read would be a fruitful shelving approach in this case.)

By: Michael Dobson

Michael Dobson — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 05:52:32 +0000

Some of the most important original works come with "scribbles" in the margins, oftentimes at the hand of one or more historically famous men. On this side of the pond, Thomas Jefferson was a well-known "scribbler" who often made "notes" to himself in the margins of the books in his library at Monticello.