Friday, August 23, 2013

Essay: You Never Know What You’ll Find in a Book

By Henry Alford
Published: December 19, 2008

The relevant ideas raised were:

  • (Book)stuffers are trying to create an aide-mémoire (memory aid) for themselves. “I have filled books with flowers I’ve received, to save the ­flowers in dried form and to remember the happy moment of receiving them,"
  • Anne Fadiman (whose book excerpt I will link in another post) says that these aides-­mémoires are often specific to the book owner’s profession. Fadiman writes about a landscape architect who “savors the very smell of the dirt embedded in his botany texts; it is the alluvium of his life’s work.”


Full Article Here

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