M&D in "real life"

[Sherwood, Harrison]

>From: 	ac038 at osfn.rhilinet.gov
 
>...But what a copy!  No dustjacket, front cover
>showing the marks of previously being bent in half, a meeting
>with water having caused the pages to be stained blue from selfsame
>cover.  Guy starts reading somewhere past the midpoint of the
>book, and I can see various annotations on the page--underlinings,
>checkmarks, etc.--indicating this is no first time perusal--as
>if the state of the book hadn't already revealed that!....  Now, a question:
what other author inspires this kind of dedicated study?

Once, one slightly sodden 2 AM in 1985, in a MacDonalds restaurant on
8th Avenue near Penn Station in New York City, in the possession of an
aficionado of outdoor living--a chap with a less than stellar fashion
sense who was carrying on an impassioned argument with (I think it was)
some persecutory squirrels (although I failed to see any of his
interlocutors)--I saw a copy of the _New York Post_ in very much the
same condition. Perhaps it was the same fellow?

My dear old professor of Pentateuch studies, Eugen Kullman, once became
so angered by yellow-highligher markings in a copy of Martin Buber's _I
and Thou_ that he had to be restrained before he suffered an apoplectic
seizure. While he was a volatile sort and it didn't take much to set him
off, he _did_ have a point about respect for the printed word: If you're
running through a Great Book with a yellow pen, slashing haphazardly at
the Important Points, you can't really be said to be _reading_, can you?
If the thing's well written, you'll follow the argument, and if you've
followed the argument, you'll remember the important points. QE
emphatically D.

On t'other hand, I remember seeing somewhere a photograph of a page of
Vladimir Nabokov's copy of _Jane Eyre_: He seems to have had a small
Squirrel Problem too.

Harrison