Book Wrangler

26 February 2006

By Bob Patterson

For college students books and yellow high-lighters go together like chicken and waffles (if you don't live in the LA area ask someone who does about the Roscoe's restaurant chain.)  Students read text books with their yellow claws ready to pounce in a manner that is so enthusiastic it reminds some imaginative witnesses saying that the book looks like the loser in a cock fight when the course has been completed.

If you buy a book and think that the boss (presupposing you write for an online magazine that adds book reviews to its mix of political commentary and punditry) might ask you to whip up a review, when you've read every word in it should you, as a person who has a high regard for books per se, underline salient passages or not? 

On the one hand, it's very handy if you think you will want to refer back to the book's most quotable passages, but, on the other hand, it destroys the books potential resale value. 

(Scribbling notes in the margin is a complete value killer, unless the note is found in a book of Hemingway criticism and a passage about his mother's religious believes is accompanied by a note that says "Mom wasn't like that!" - but margin notes are a different topic, perhaps for a future column, and so is the book with the comments about life in Ernie's family.)

It is so cumbersome to keep a small sheet of paper for a new book and jot down the page numbers where you find something that may need to be quoted later.  For example, say you're are reading Edward Rice's book Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton and you want to keep track of a reference to Baghdad on pages 198-199, which says, "When the shaykh approached Baghdad, he was greeted with a cupful of water sent by another shaykh, meaning that: 'Baghdad being full of holy men, there was no room for him.'"

Suppose you lose the little scrap of paper with that guides you to that passage, as well as reminds you to look up the word "hongo" (which seems to be the Middle East equivalent of "payola")?  If the piece of paper gets separated from the book, what then?

Comedian W. C. Fields has been quoted as saying, "If a things worth having then it's worth cheating for" - so what can a book owner do to mark the good lines and not destroy the book's value?  Wasn't he an avid reader?  Wouldn't he recommend maintaining a book's integrity?  What can you do?  Maybe, if you put a small ball point pen dot in the margin, it will be undetectable to others and work as well as a highlighter as long as you retain possession of the volume?

The notes for use if and when we do a review of Rice's book were a bit of a retroactive experiment because we adopted the little dot in the margin methodology many moons ago and have found it to be a very pragmatic way of reminding us what caught our fancy when we read the book.

Sure most folks can probably quote the opening line of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but suppose you like the line, "But there were not costume stores open, and we weren't up to burglarizing a church."  It's an odd line and it's not likely that most folks would ever get a chance to quote it, but wouldn't it be best to be prepared?

Flipping open Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent we quickly find that "the practical value of success depends not a little on the way you look at it" was a passage that we thought might someday be useful.  (Isn't it obvious that pundits who stumble across that quote in this column might like to know that it was on page 109?)

Few who read Dickens' Tale of Two Cities would note this passage - "On inanimate nature, as on the men and women who cultivate it, a prevalent tendency towards an appearance of vegetating unwillingly – a dejected disposition to give up, and wither away."  However, some folks who read The Big Sleep with Raymond Chandler's description of General Sternwood grousing about indulging in his favorite vices vicariously, might like to have the Dickens' line readily available, just in case they ever get a chance to weave the two into a column or bit of political punditry.

In Catch-22 Joseph Heller wrote (on page 193 of the ubiquitous paperback), "He was a blustering intrepid bully who brooded inconsolably over the terrible ineradicable impressions he knew he kept making on people of prominence who were scarcely aware that he was even alive."   

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray is itself a virtual collection of excellent quotes, so using marks to make your personal selection of the best seems natural.  Is women's lib still being discussed?  If so, then one might need quote a line from page 132 - "They love being dominated." 

Odds are you can quote lines from the movie, but do you know that it is on page 104 of The Third Man (Penguin edition with The Fallen Idol) is where you find, "Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving – for ever?  If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money – without hesitation?  Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?  Fee of income tax, old man.  Fee of income tax."

So it goes with the tell-tale dots in my books.

Sure it's easy to use a collection of quotes and let someone else do all the work.  For example, in Jon Winokur's Writers On Writing, we find on page 39 this quote from Blaise Pascal, "The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first." 

Now, if the disk jockey will play the theme from The Third Man, we'll slip out of here unnoticed.  Didn't Orson Wells say the line, "Don't be so gloomy … under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michael Angelo, Leonardo Di Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce?  The cuckoo clock!  So long, Holly."  He did say "the Borgias" didn't he?  Sometimes I think I hear the name of a different family.  Oh well, have a Halliburton week. 

Copyright © 2006 - Robert Patterson

Email the author at worldslaziestjournalist@yahoo.com