Heavy shelves

Scott McLemee, writing in today’s Inside Higher Ed, ruminates on personal and institutional book collections.

A few months ago, I was happy to be able to acquire an obscure volume of essays from the 1920s in a print-on-demand paperback edition. The book was something it seemed unlikely, a few years ago, ever to see reissued. Now it was suddenly available from online booksellers at a fair (in not exactly low) cost.

But when it arrived, I had a less pleasant surprise. The reprint house had not bothered to get a clean copy of the original text. It was full of underlined passages and marginal scribblings (all of them, as it happens, strikingly inane).This kind of disappointment is far from unusual. Other reprints may come with missing pages — or a shot of the hand of whoever did the scanning.


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