If you want to mark up a book, buy it

As longtime readers know, I love libraries. Just now I have about six books from the UC Library, three from Berkeley and another four or five from Contra Costa.  But when I opened The End of Beauty, by Jorie Graham from the UC Library, I found that a previous reader had heavily underlined, parenthesized, exclamation pointed, and otherwise defaced the poems.

I spent about an hour with Larry’s gum eraser, undoing (as best I can–pencil marks are not fully erasable) this work, which ruined the poems for me. This isn’t the worst page by far, but one I thought to copy before I finished.

Hopefully I can start reading again tomorrow. If I made the laws, marking up library books would be a felony.