The other day I discovered a pencil-written recipe in the back of a secondhand book I got for Christmas. It got me thinking about handwriting in books: signatures, inscriptions, previous owners’ names, marginalia, and so on. If I can find enough examples of all those in my personal library, I might turn this into a low-key series. For now, though, I’ve rounded up my signed copies for a little photo gallery.
I’ve never placed particular value on owning signed copies of books. I’m just as likely to resell a signed book or give it away to a friend as I am a standard copy. The signed books I do have on my shelves are usually a result of having gone to an author event and figuring I may as well stick around for the signing. A few were totally accidental in secondhand purchases.
Though I’ve had personal correspondence with Paulette Bates Alden and love the three books of hers that I’ve read, this signature is entirely coincidental, in a used copy from Amazon. Shame on Patti for getting rid of it after Paulette’s book club visit in 2000!
I love Karen Armstrong’s work, especially her two memoirs about deciding not to be a nun, and A History of God. I’ve seen her speak twice and am always impressed by her clear reasoning. (Tell you a secret, though: I couldn’t get through this particular book.)
While my husband worked at Royal Holloway we saw Alain de Botton speak at the Runnymede Literary Festival and I had him sign a copy of my favorite of his books.
Krista Detor is one of our favorite singer-songwriters. We’ll be seeing her play for the fourth time in March. Luckily for us (but unluckily for the world, and for her coffers), this folk songstress from Indiana is unknown enough to play folk clubs and house concerts on both sides of the Atlantic. She wrote a book documenting the creative process behind her next-to-last album; when I saw her in Maryland she signed it with “Maybe see you across the pond!”
I have yet to read one of Melissa Harrison’s books, though I’m interested in her novels and her book on British weather. However, she edited the Seasons anthologies issued by the Wildlife Trusts last year – two of which my husband’s writing appeared in. When she spoke on the University of Reading campus about notions of the countryside in literature, my husband went along to meet her and bought a paperback of her second novel for her to sign.
I’ve seen David Lodge speak twice, both times at the London Review Bookshop. He’s one of my favorite authors ever but, alas, isn’t all that funny or personable live; his autobiography is similarly humorless compared to his novels. Deaf Sentence was a return to his usual comic style after his first stab at historical fiction (Author, Author, about Henry James’s later life). The second time I saw him he was promoting A Man of Parts, which again imagines the inner life of a famous author – this time H.G. Wells.
An obscene bargain from Amazon that just happened to be signed. I’m looking forward to starting this one soon: books about book are (almost) always such a cozy delight.
Plus three signed copies languishing in boxes in America:
- Blue Shoe by Anne Lamott: I love Lamott’s nonfiction but have never tried one of her novels. I found this one at a library book sale, going for $1; I guess nobody noticed the signature.
- The Sixteenth of June by Maya Lang: I originally read the book via NetGalley, but it quickly became a favorite. After she saw my five-star review, Maya asked me to help her out with word-of-mouth promotion and was kind enough to send me a signed copy as thanks.
- The Life of D.H. Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography by Keith M. Sagar: Sagar was one of the keynote speakers at the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America conference I attended in the summer of 2005.
This one-sitting read is a monologue by an embittered librarian who arrives one morning to discover a patron has been locked into the basement overnight—a captive audience. Responsible for Geography, she hopes for a promotion to History, her favorite subject. Alas, no one seems to appreciate this library as a bastion of learning anymore; they only come for DVDs and a place to keep warm. That is, except for Martin, a young PhD researcher who’s caught her eye. But he doesn’t even seem to notice she exists. In one uninterrupted paragraph, this celebrates all that books do for us but suggests that they still can’t fix a broken heart.
When this won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction in 1987, the author was in her sixties. It’s since been championed by Ann Patchett, who contributed a Foreword to this 2011 edition. Father Declan de Loughry, fishing for salmon, reflects on the recent death of parishioner Kevin Dennehy. Before he died, Kevin admitted that he and Enda were never properly married. Yet Enda begs the priest to approve a death notice calling Kevin her “beloved husband,” promising she’ll then explain “the all of it” – the very good reason they never married. As she tells her full story, which occupies the bulk of the novella, Father Declan tries to strike a balance between the moral high ground and human compassion.
This starts off as the simple story of J. Mendelssohn, an octogenarian who wakes up on a snowy morning in his New York City apartment, contemplating his past – Lithuanian/Polish ancestry, work as a judge and marriage to Eileen, whom he met as a boy in Dublin – and planning to meet his son at a restaurant for lunch. But all of a sudden it turns into a murder mystery on page 24: “Later the homicide detectives will be surprised…” In 13 sections headed by epigraphs from the Wallace Stevens poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” McCann flits through Mendelssohn’s thoughts and flips between the events preceding and immediately following the murder. A late interrogation scene is particularly strong – “unlike our poetry, we like our murders to be fully solved.”
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On the surface this is similar to 
Brown is a novelist from Seattle. This is an account of her mother’s death from what sounds like stomach cancer. The disease progressed quickly and her mother died at home, under hospice care, in New Mexico in 1997. As the title suggests, the brief thematic chapters are arranged around vocabulary words like “anemia” and “metastasis.” My favorite chapters were about washing: her mother’s habit of reading while taking long baths, and the ways Brown and her sister tried to care for their mother’s disintegrating body, including a plan to prepare the corpse themselves. Clinical descriptions of vomiting alternate with magical thinking to accompany her mother’s hallucinations: “You’re packed, Mom, but all of us aren’t going, just you. But you’ve got everything you need.”
This 1996 memoir was sparked by reading a quote from a Chinese Buddhist in a New York Times article: he suggested that reading is dangerous as it imposes others’ ideas on you and doesn’t allow you to use your own mind freely. Schwartz, of course, begs to differ. As a novelist, reading has been her lifeline. She looks back at her childhood reading and her pretentious college student opinions on Franz Kafka and Henry James, and explains that she lets serendipity guide her reading choices nowadays, rather than a strict TBR list: “reading at random – letting desire lead – feels like the most faithful kind.”
Why We Came to the City
The Cauliflower®
The Tusk That Did the Damage
For Books’ Sake
Night Ringing
Mon amie américaine
Specimen: Stories
Seal
Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894) is most often remembered for her connection to male writers; her great-uncle was pioneering American novelist James Fenimore Cooper, and in her later years as an expatriate in Europe she associated with Henry James, fueling rumors of a romance between them. Deserving to be known in her own right, Woolson represents key junctures between realism and regionalism, and between American and European styles. Gives a remarkable picture of a bold, bright woman who paved the way for writers such as Edith Wharton, E. M. Forster, and Willa Cather, and who arguably might be hailed in the same breath as Henry James and George Eliot.
Third Way magazine
Mosquitoland by David Arnold: I don’t read a whole lot of YA, but the voice of this one captured me right away. Like Hazel in The Fault in Our Stars, Mim (Mary Iris Malone) is a lovably sarcastic oddball – she describes herself as “a young Ellen Page” à la Juno – with some hidden issues that come out over the course of the book. Here Mim’s journey takes the form of a road trip from Mississippi, where she lives with her father and new stepmother, back to Ohio to be with her sick mother. She meets a kooky cast of secondary characters along the way, narrowly escapes danger, and even gets a chance at romance.
The Shadow Hour
How to Be Here
