The End of Books

Sheila Liming recalls watching a university library discard books to make room for a renovation. To trash a library book is to deaccession it, and as she remembers what she learned studying Edith Wharton’s marginalia, Liming suggests we lose not only the text itself, but also the conversation that take place between a careful reader and the author that appear as comments, questions, and provocations in the margins.

My obsession with Wharton’s library had emerged five years earlier, and somewhat by accident. As a graduate student in English, I had received a fellowship to the Mount, Wharton’s home in Lenox, Massachusetts, where I became convinced that to know and understand her as a writer, I had to understand her as a reader. Paging through nearly three thousand library books, I saw her talk back to them, disagree with them, question and antagonize and struggle with them. In one, she penciled the word succotash—the nineteenth-century equivalent of nonsense; on the fly of another, inscribed to her lover William Morton Fullerton, she composed a four-stanza poem that does not exist anywhere else in her own hand. These physical traces allowed me to see how she had read her books, but they also showed me where she had wilted under another writer’s power. Her underlinings and exclamation points and squiggles became an atlas by which I discerned both her evolution as a writer and her battles as a reader to understand texts written in six different languages.