Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman Page A

is that until the editor’s call, the book that it ennobled reposed precisely where it should have: in a place of honor on Mother’s shelf. And there it shall return. How melancholy, by contrast, are the legions of inscribed copies one finds in any used-book rack, each a memorial to a betrayed friendship. Do the traitors believe that their faithlessness will remain secret? If so, they are sadly deluded. Hundreds of people will witness it, including, on occasion, the inscriber. Shaw once came across one of his books in a secondhand shop, inscribed
To
———
with esteem, George
Bernard Shaw
. He bought the book and returned it to ———, adding the line,
With renewed esteem, George
Bernard Shaw.
    I once saw a copy of
Mayflower Madam
inscribed by Sydney Biddle Barrows
To Patrick
—
Richard has told me so much about you
. Henry Miller could have written an entire novel about that inscription. It would take Turgenev to write a novel about the inscription I found in
The Golden Book: The Story of Fine Books and Bookmaking
. It read:
To Father on his birthday, March 16, 1928. In the nature of a peace offering? Alan
. After sixty-seven years, that heartbreaking question mark still hangs in the air. I only hope that
The Golden Book
found its way to a bookseller long after Father’s death. If not, Father, shame on you.
    Fortunately, the very finest inscriptions, like the finest love letters, rarely pass out of a family. The most bravura performance I’ve seen—testimony that the art of the romantic inscription was not buried
with
Byron—graces the Oxford Classical Text of the complete works of Virgil, given to my friend Maud Gleason when she was reading
litterae humaniores
at Oxford. Maud says she would no sooner part with it than with her son’s first tooth. As she explained to me, “I had repaired to the King’s Arms, the pub closest to the Bodleian Library, with a fellow student, a dashing but bullheaded young Scotsman who proclaimed over coffee that Homer was vastly inferior to Virgil. As a Homeric partisan, I was much miffed, even though, as the conversation progressed, I had to confess that I had never actually
read
Virgil. ‘If you think Virgil’s so great,’ said I, the brash American, ‘why don’t you give me a copy?’ Soon thereafter a blue volume arrived on my doorstep, inscribed on the flyleaf with thirteen lines of Latin dactylic hexameter—Virgil’s preferred meter.” The inscription began
Poscimur; atque aliquid quando tu, cara, requiris / Dabitur
(A request has been made, and when you, dear, ask anything of me, it shall be given); continued with an apostrophe to Maud, whom the Scotsman declared that he admired, as all poets were wont to admire Virgil,
quanta desiderat astra / Papilio volitans
(as the fluttering butterfly longs for the stars); and ended with a pledge
amoris arnicitiaeque
(of love and friendship).
    “So what happened?” I asked Maud, who now teaches classics at Stanford.
    “I never slept with the boy,” she said. “But I fell for Virgil, and I’ve slept with the book many times.”
    The best inscription
I’ve
ever gotten—it may not be as dazzling as the Scotsman’s, but I wouldn’t trade—is on the title page of
The Enigma of Suicide
, by George Howe Colt. I’ve never slept with the book, but I’ve slept with the author many times. It reads (how far we have come, George, since our new true friendship!)
To my beloved wife… . This is your book, too. As my life, too, is also yours
.

 Y O U  A R E  T H E R E  
    O n November 12, 1838, Thomas Babington Macaulay set out by horse-drawn coach from Florence to Rome. “My journey lay over the field of Thrasymenus,” he wrote in his journal, “and as soon as the sun rose, I read Livy’s description of the scene.”
    The moment I read that sentence, I knew that Macaulay and I were peas in a pod. It is true that I had never reformed the Indian educational system, served in the House of Commons, or written a five-volume