> I guess I feel the same way. Generally, I try to keep all my books in the best possible condition, but I'm not opposed to the *idea* of altering a book. I had a teacher in high school who always wrote all over the margins of her books (she has a huge collection of history, anthropology, sociology, etc books) whenever she found something interesting; usually it was a cross-reference to another of her books.

Oooh, this is one of the things that makes me cringe. Not the idea of people writing notes in their *own* books, but ... gah! ... opening a library book to find some idiot has decided to add helpful commentary.

I have levels of cringeworthiness with this. The lowest level is what I found this week, in a book on genetic technology -- a Chinese-speaking previous reader had underlined words and phrases they weren't familiar with, and pencilled in a Chinese translation in the margins. This is fine with me, although I was slightly annoyed that they didn't go back and erase it all before returning the book.

The second level is something I used to find in a surprising number of books from the university library, and it annoys me a LOT. I found an example a few weeks ago, in a book I got out on the battle of the Somme. A previous reader had disagreed with the author's remarks about Marshal Haig. Instead of thinking "I disagree with this author's remarks about Marshal Haig" and moving on, this jerk had written IN RED FELT PEN all over the page to say things like "WRONG!! Haig was NOT blah blah blah. The blah blah would not have been blah blah if something-or-other had been properly taken into account, this meant that blah blah blah blah and Haig blah blah blah Kitchener's Army blah blah Battle of High Wood blah blah history shows that blah blah". People like this should go and write their own blasted doctoral thesis, ideally not in red felt pen all over somebody else's.

This is a kind of arrogance I find excruciating. It's different from writing notes in the margin to aid your own research.

The third level is when somebody, reading a book written in a previous era, sees fit to CROSS OUT words and phrases they find offensive, such as "mankind", and write in what they think the author SHOULD have used if the author had owned a time machine and had made a detailed study of acceptable word usage in the year 2002. There used to be an Agatha Christie fan who belonged to my local library who did this; even worse, this person would cross out what he/she considered to be poor grammar or language usage and write in corrections. Almost every Christie book I checked out had this person's arrogance scrawled all over it. I had fantasies of staking out the Agatha Christie section for surveillance, perhaps manoeuvering all Agatha Christie borrowers into a situation where I could get a sample of their handwriting, and then inflicting severe bodily harm on the culprit.

Brunnen-"gah"G