Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries
by Ander Monson
About this book
An exuberant, expansive cataloging of the intimate physical relationship between a reader and a book.Readers of physical books leave traces: marginalia, slips of paper, fingerprints, highlighting, inscriptions. All books have histories, and libraries are not just collections of books and databases but a medium of long-distance communication with other writers and readers.Letter to a Future Lover collects several dozen brief pieces written in response to library ephemera--with “library” defined broadly, ranging from university institutions to friends’ shelves, from a seed library to a KGB prison library--and addressed to readers past, present, and future. Through these witty, idiosyncratic essays, Ander Monson reflects on the human need to catalog, preserve, and annotate; the private and public pleasures of reading; the nature of libraries; and how the self can be formed through reading and writing.
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