The gratifying habit of survival

An intriguing thing about books: it's remarkable that many of them avoid destruction as long as they do.

So many other cultural accoutrements meet with an earlier demise: active abuse or passive neglect usually does the trick. Chairs, tables, bedsteads fall apart. Tableware gets smashed, or perhaps stolen for silver content. Paintings that fall out of fashion are often consigned to oblivion, mildew-covered in the back of a closet, rotting at the bottom of a trash dump.

It's painful to remember that Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, painted on a wall in the refectory of Sta. Maria delle Grazie in Milan, was in a state of deterioration within a few years of its creation, and was damaged by bored French troops during their occupation of the city right around the turn of the sixteenth century. One ruffian, one thief, one fanatic, one war can obliterate a sublime act of creation.

Books rarely top the shopping list of the barbarian at the gate. It sometimes takes the iniquity and thoroughness of a Hitler or a Stalin to imperil the printed volume.

Pictured above is the opening page of the aforementioned Shakespeare octavo (see posting immediately below). It shows pride of ownership in a bit of marginalia at the top of the page, courtesy of one Elizabeth Philips, who added the date of May, 1788. The small woodcut illustration includes a king's crown along with shackles and a chain, evidently touching on the burdensome nature of kingship that frequently emerges and reemerges throughout Shakespeare's works. Or perhaps it's a symbolic depiction of Macbeth's tyrannical rule.

The slightest bit of doodling in the pages of a centuries-old book is one of an antiquarian volume's great delights.  Who exactly was Elizabeth Philips? Was she English? Or was she a young American in a new nation trying to gets its footing? Did she recoil in horror at Macbeth's murder of Duncan, or at Lady Macbeth's unladylike complicity? Sustenance for the imagination.