author-signed books
A friend who I'd like to remain nameless - ok, it's Suzanne, the heartless wench - recently gave me a pile of books and - here's the heartless part - one of them was signed by its author. Suzanne, honestly, how do you give away a book the author signed to you personally? It was Quakertown by Lee Martin and it was a pretty good book.
I have a couple signed books - Maureen Dowd's Bushworld (signed "Cobra"), Madeleine L'Engle's The Glorious Impossible, and all of Chris Smither's CDs. I would never give them up. How does anyone else feel about this?
And I always feel so sad when I buy a book at a secondhand store and there's an personal inscription from giver to givee. I hope my friends never give away the books I give them with inscriptions, and if you have, I don't want to know about it. I treasure the books people have given me with personal inscriptions - a dear, sweet friend from college gave me an inscribed copy of The Prophet and a volume of Jim Harrison's poetry. She promptly then tried to kill herself after freshman year and her father whisked her away and I have never been able to find her since. I'll never give the books away, they make me think fondly - and sadly- of Angela.
I even hung onto a copy of Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten from my first college boyfriend, who later smashed my heart into a million pieces (perhaps the gift of that book should have been ample warning but I was 19 and naive as all get out.) And I still have a beautiful copy of Poems of Childhood with illustrations by one of my favorite artists, Maxfield Parrish, that my true love (different guy, thank God) gave me after we broke up and I knew we were not going to ever get married.
Ah. Such sentimentalism. I seem to have enough to cover for Suzanne : ) Suzanne, what do you have to say for yourself?
posted by BabelBabe @ 10:44 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
yeah, i guess it'd be important if you cared about the author. ok, i'll buy that.
I guess I've always gone out of my way to get my books signed--they're books I'd want to keep.
I feel the same way as Val, though, about finding used books that have inscriptions in them. I'm sentimental too, and those books seem more like orphans than books with no personalization.
speaking of, has anyone else checked out Bookcrossing? (www.bookcrossing.com). I so want to do this, but can't give up any of my books. And you'd want to do it with a book you loved.
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