The Eleventh Commandment

I like to think of myself as a reasonable person. Easy to get along with. Nice. I like to think of myself as...not flexible, exactly (I am by inclination a creature of habit), but at least not rigid. There are, however, a some human behaviors that I find absolutely unacceptable, that fill me with unmitigated and unrelenting but not unreasonable, in my opinion, rage. The chronic misuse of the words “less” and “fewer,” particularly in grocery store express lanes, for example. And the apparent inability for restaurant workers across the country to understand that “no onions” means no onions. People who talk on their cell phones during movies, plays, concerts, and other public performances also. But the thing that enrages me as nothing else can is when people break the eleventh commandment: Thou Shalt Not Write In Library Books.

Although I am not inclined to forgive any infraction of this rule, there are varying degrees of seriousness. A few marks or margin notes made in very light pencil can be erased, after all. The occasional, almost imperceptible dot made with a ball-point pen is perhaps not too bad. But marking your place with little stars is over the line--God made bookmarks for a reason--and underlining whole passages is absolutely out. The grossest offense against the eleventh commandment, however, is surely the use of the fluorescent yellow highlighter. No highlighter is acceptable, of course, but somehow the fluorescent yellow highlighter seems to imply an extra touch of obnoxious self-involvement, disregard for others, and contempt for the sanctity of the commonly held resource that is the lending library.

The worst highlighter offense I’ve ever encountered came last year in a copy of The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture that I checked out of the Mansfield Library at the University of Montana last year. I settled myself on the couch in my living room with a mechanical pencil, a large stack of blank 3x5 note cards, a fully charged iPod and a mug of blueberry tea and cracked open the book in its red library binding. I was expecting to spend a nice afternoon conducting research for my master’s thesis and getting lost in Wendell Berry’s delightful prose. But someone else had been there before me: every page bore the garish marks of yellow highlighter. That previous student (or, I shudder to even contemplate, professor) had apparently not understood the distinction between writing in a book one has bought and intends to resell and a book someone has borrowed. A book that does not belong to you. And I wondered if that other student was really as arrogant and self centered as his or her treatment of poor Wendell implied. Was he (or she) really so broke, lazy, rude or stupid that he (or she!) was unwilling to buy the book outright, or to at least to employ the time honored combination of photocopying, post-it notes and index cards that has served the university student so well for so long? If the library stands for all the good things that civilization and culture can achieve, the selfishly defaced library book stands for all the failures of the human race to live up to the library’s potential.

I was reminded of yellowed copy of America recently while perusing a copy of Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every mood, Moment, and Reason that I had checked out of the Multnomah County Library. I’m not normally a fan of “list” books--more often than not I find them disappointing. Indeed, not long before checking out Book Lust I’d read Cinematherapy: The Girl's Guide to Movies for Every Mood and found it unoriginal and sometimes uninformative--more style than substance. But I was intrigued by the table of contents in Book Lust so I gave it a shot and was pleasantly surprised by it. Finally, here was someone who, it seemed, had the same kind of reading “moods” that I did, who understood that sometimes you want to read books that are evocative of a certain place, time, or feeling but may seem to be otherwise unrelated. Here was someone who understood how serious readers read!

So I was pleasantly surprised by the content. I was unpleasantly surprised by the book itself. Someone, or possibly several someones, had taken it upon themselves to go through the book with the ubiquitous yellow highlighter and a blue ball-point pen, marking books that, I suppose, they have either read or would like to read. I found it all terribly upsetting. After all, I would have assumed that the kind of person who would pick up Book Lust in the first place would be a serious reader, too, someone who loves books, and libraries, and who understands how to treat books borrowed from another reader. But clearly I was wrong: either I have been inclined to thing too well of readers, or books about the love of books can attract even those who do not, themselves, love books the way I do.

Having enjoyed the contents of Nancy Pearl’s first book so much I’ve started in on its sequel: More Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason. It’s blessedly free of highlighting, but then again, it hasn’t been in the library system very long--it’s probably only a matter of time before it resembles its older sister. I can’t prevent that. But when I go to make my notes on More Book Lust, you can be sure I’ll be doing it the old fashioned way: with pencil, post-its, and a few blank white 3x5 index cards.