Monday, July 26, 2010

A Marginal Note Re: Missed Opportunities

Good Lord.  I was in the Strand last week, having a grand old time browsing, thinking a bit about the recently departed Strand habitue David Markson, and I had no idea that big, annotated chunks of Markson's personal library were for sale all around me.  David Markson's copy of Tristram Shandy, $5.  Sh*t.  It's not so much that I regret missing out on buying these books.  Though it would be a cool thing to own a book from the library of a writer I admire very much, it might feel a bit ghoulish to go bargain hunting for a dead man's possessions.  What I regret is missing out on the thrill/chill I would have experienced in pulling a book off the shelf at the Strand, looking inside, and realizing it had belonged to David Markson.

[Update: HTMLGiant, as expected, is all over this thing. And in the comments to that second post, I noticed that there's a Facebook group for people who've acquired Markson's books, a virtual reassemblage of his library.]

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