Giles Goodland   UK
The Oxford Book of English Verse, annotated by Evelyn West, 1917
For years I have been interested in annotations in books. Paradoxically, the thing that renders a book worthless in money terms is what makes a book unique and interesting in personal terms, Often the annotations that a reader leaves in the margins of the book is a continuation of a discourse, showing that what the writer writes is never actually final.

This seems particularly so with the copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse, which I bought for almost, nothing from a charity shop. It was dated 1917 on the flyleaf by one Evelyn West in the same hand that had left profuse annotations on nearly every page. Some of the annotations were fairly banal observations on rhyme-scheme or biography, sometimes faces were doodled in the margin, at other times the comments seemed to have an obvious reference to world events at the time. Many of these comments, with the accompanying printed text, could be cut into bookmark shapes. As bookmarks, they can now continue yet another layer of conversation with the unfinished dialogue that a book is.

email: GilesGoodland@aol.com

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