The library book with someone else's notes in the margin

Second-hand copy, 1994 edition, and from page thirty onwards somebody had been arguing with the author in pencil. By chapter four they were winning.

The argument

It starts politely. A question mark here, a surely not? there. Around page ninety the handwriting changes size and the notes get longer, and by the final chapter there is a full paragraph on the endpaper that is better written than the chapter it is responding to.

Somebody read this more carefully in 1994 than I was reading it, and they left the evidence in the margins for me.

What it changed about how I read

I started writing in books. Not neatly, and not for anyone — but the act of having to put the objection into words turns out to be the difference between disagreeing with a book and understanding why.

I also stopped buying new copies when a used one exists. About one in fifteen has something in it. That is a better hit rate than most recommendation algorithms.

The endpaper

I will not reproduce it, because it is theirs. But it ends with a date, and initials, and the line “will think about this again in ten years” — which was thirty-two years ago now, and I have been wondering ever since whether they did.