Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

Guiccioli that ends,
I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you. Think of me sometimes when the Alps and the ocean divide us
,—
but they never will, unless you wish it
. (Now
that’s
the sort of thing I wouldn’t have minded finding inside
The Biography of a Grizzly
.)
    Even in the heat of passion, Byron remembered to observe proper inscription etiquette by writing on the flyleaf instead of the title page, which is traditionally reserved for a book’s author. I learned this only recently, after having defaced dozens of other writers’ title pages. I should have cracked the code years ago, since the Books by Friends and Relatives section of our own library contains a profusion of title-page inscriptions, all licitly deployed. My father inscribed
Famous Monster Tales
, an anthology to which he contributed a preface when I was a sullen fourteen-year-old,
For Anne, from that old monster, Daddy
. Mark Helprin, who likes to leave messages on his friends’ answering machines in spurious (but highly convincing) dialects, inscribed several of his books in imaginary languages. In
A Dove of the East
, he wrote
Skanaarela tan floss atcha atcha gamble to. Da bubo barta flay? Staarcroft
. I spent the better part of a decade trying in vain to figure out what that meant.
    A distant rung down from the “presentation copy”—an inscribed book actually presented by the author as a gift—is the “inscription copy,” a book inscribed (sometimes, one suspects, with a gun to the author’s head) at the owner’s request. Before the advent of store-sponsored book sign-ings, most readers got a book inscribed by mailing it to the author and praying that it would make a round-trip. Yeats once asked Thomas Hardy how he handled these requests. Hardy led Yeats upstairs to a large room that was filled from floor to ceiling with books—thousands of them. “Yeats,” said Hardy, “these are the books that were sent to me for signature.”
    The first edition of
On Forsyte ’Change
that I saw last month in a secondhand bookstore had obviously made a more fruitful circuit. On the title page, in small, formal handwriting—the work of an old-fashioned fountain pen—were the words
Inscribed for C. F. Sack cordially by John Galsworthy, Oct 6 1930
. Presumably, Galsworthy didn’t know C. F. Sack from Adam, and he didn’t pretend to. But what are we to make of
To Owen
—
Love + Kisses
—
Brooke Shields XX
(to quote from the title page of
On Your Own
, glimpsed in another bookstore)? I feel certain that Ms. Shields had no more intention of kissing Owen than Galsworthy had of kissing C. F. Sack—the fact that she signed her full name is a dead giveaway—but that was no deterrent. Her panting communication, written in black felt-tip pen, filled nearly half the page. (I can report, after a close study of the celebrity-autograph department of the Strand Bookstore in New York City, that the felt-tip pen has achieved near-total hegemony. Barbara Cartland writes in pink, Ivana Trump in purple, and Francine du Plessix Gray in green.)
    My friend Mark O’Donnell, whom I consider the nonesuch of inscribers, would never stoop to such tactics. At a signing party for his collection
Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales
, he came up with something different for each postulant:
Dear Reader, I love you
(an ironic homage to the Shields genre);
No time to write
—
Life in dang
———; and, the most heartfelt of all,
Thank you for shopping retail
.
    M aggie Hivnor, the paperback editor of the University of Chicago Press, once told me that when she adds an out-of-print title to her list, she calls the author and asks for a pristine copy that can be photographically reproduced. “The author is usually a man,” she explained. “In a few weeks, a beautifully kept copy of his book arrives, a little dusty perhaps but otherwise absolutely perfect. And on the title page it invariably says
To Mother
.”
    Now
that’s
a real inscription. The best thing about it