By nature I am a book buyer rather than a borrower. My shelves are a fossil record of all the books and authors I’ve read down through the years. Every book has become a touchstone. When I pull one from the shelf, leaf through it: the heft of the book within my hand, its cover design, combined with certain phrases in the text, all act to trigger memories of the reader I once was. A proper bookshelf should be a testament to one’s youthful passions. I have an entire bookcase — six shelves — of Beat-related material: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Synder, Ferlinghetti, vivid reminders of the time when my bible was On the Road. In the basement are boxes full of science fiction paperbacks that I simply have no shelf-space for. Sometimes I will open up a box and rummage through it just to rekindle memories of that rich stage in my reading life, when swash-buckling tales of Mars, and Venus, and deepest space, and the centre of the earth, held me in their thrall. If I had borrowed the books I read instead of buying them, many of those memories would have vanished long ago.

Of course constraints of budget and of shelf-space mean I can’t buy everything I read. There’s the matter of availability as well. My E. B. White binge is still going strong, but I discovered early on that, apart from Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, his books are almost impossible to find in stores. This is where a library card comes in handy.

One of the attractions of books borrowed from the library is that in them you’ll sometimes find traces of the readers who have come along the same path ahead of you. In a Paul Bowles book of travels through the non-Christian world I discovered a ticket to a documentary film on Al-Jazeera. Another reader trying to gain insight into Islam.

Other library books reveal their readers’ thoughts through the pencil marks those readers leave behind. I can tell, for example, that a previous borrower of Essays of E. B. White was struggling with White’s vocabulary. Every page has a scattering of words underlined, accompanied by puzzled question marks within the margins. In the first two essays alone the following words caused difficulty to some valiant, but befuddled reader:

self-liberated, congenitally, effrontery, jester, raconteur, pundit, wielding, mantle, camphor, detonated, rout, chattels, fête, bivouacked, busybody, deft, prying, whiteface heifer, additives, sulked, firmament, disheveled, bales, onset, vistas, encrusted, flue, tenure, dogged, misadventures, forehandedly, saddled, rapturously, careened, gutter, hackles, purulent, spruce, encroach, garish, thicket, antic, maladroitness, exalted, consecrated, platoon, officiated, shingles, catapulted, parlance, beacon, disreputable

You sense the reader catching breath: there’s a lull, a few virgin pages, before the underlining begins again:

fraudulent, perennial, evocative, wafts, rummaging, quill, shady, pluckily, tether, expropriate, masticate, regurgitate, dollop, irascibility, emanations

The gaps in the implied reader’s vocabulary boggle me. Some of these words missing I can understand. But to find so many of them marked… It is as if the reader had gone straight from Charlotte’s Web to Essays in one blind, optimistic leap. I hope that each problematic word was at least looked up in a good dictionary (White favored the unabridged Webster’s); you can almost hear the parched vocabulary crying out for nourishment.

The mystery reader seemed to make it through “The Ring of Time” all right, and later pencil marks suggest they plowed on through the book. But you can sense their frustration mount. Entire paragraphs from “The St. Nicholas League” are underlined, and, in an ironic coda of surrender, the word “dense” stands out forlornly from one paragraph, marked with triple underlines. It is the final mark.

I read this hieroglyph as an admission of defeat, a doleful turning back in the face of a bracing gust of rhetoric. Back to the barnyard world of Charlotte, perhaps; Charlotte who preferred to stick with short and simple words: ones that could be spun legibly into a web.