Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Signatures in unexpected places

Elvis, Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger: signatures found on due-date slips and in library books (CBC).

I’ve found on my library’s shelves books signed by Willa Cather and H.L. Mencken and Louis Zukofksy, all there for borrowing. Each time I headed straight to the circulation desk. “This should not be on the shelves,” said I, earnestly.

My favorite professor, Jim Doyle, once found in Harvard’s Widener Library a volume of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough with handwritten notes by T.S. Eliot. Yes, that T.S. Eliot. Jim took the book to a librarian, who promptly took it away.

comments: 6

ksh said...

What a coincidence. I just found a signed copy of The Necessity of Empty Spaces by Paul Gruchow in our library.

Michael Leddy said...

I didn’t know his name, but that’s quite a find. Libraries don’t always know what they have, do they?

ksh said...

Gruchow was a student of John Berryman.

Michael Leddy said...

Yes, I saw that in Wikipedia.

Sean Crawford said...

A downtown technical bookstore, among it's decorative old books, had Rudyard Kipling's Land and Sea Tales. I fetched it the clerk's desk, and showed them the title page with a swastika. Before the war, that was Kipling's trade mark.

Michael Leddy said...

Wow. I found the background.

I recall having to explain the swastikas when showing a class a short film about Tibetan Buddhism.