Why Waste a Perfectly Good Notebook?

I have a confession.

I am addicted to buying stuff on Amazon.

Okay, not "addicted to" so much as "fond of," and not "." so much as "every few weeks or so." Nonetheless, there is an eternal struggle between my id and my pocketbook. I compromise by buying the cheapest copy possible. I'm not the sort who insists that all my books and DVDs are in mint condition, so this usually works out pretty well, as even the cheapest items are functional, however vandalized and ugly they may be on the surface.

To prepare for the release of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, I recently bought a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird for one cent. I'm sure there's a perfect explanation for how anyone can profit off a one-cent book, presumably relating to a combination of shipping fees and bulk sales, but I haven't taken economics since High School, so I couldn't tell you what it is. Needless to say, anything that can go for one cent is likely to be in less-than-mint shape. I believe that the item was listed as "acceptable" condition, which here translates as "all the pages, and a bunch of extra words in the margins."

This is clearly the work of a literature student, or perhaps an aspiring writer, or at the very least an extraordinarily bored airline passenger. Truth be told, I found it more charming than troubling. I could still read the book perfectly (and it was still a masterpiece, if you're curious). The notes in the margins are really just the sprinkles--though to be really accurate, this metaphor does call for the sprinkles to be on, say, a vacuum cleaner.

I would never scribble in the margins of a novel myself, but I was impressed by how thorough the pro-scribbling previous owner was here. Words like "foreshadowing" or "symbolism" appear on nearly every page. About 68% of the text is underlined. Every time an adult tells Scout off, the notes point out that this person is an authority figure. It seems that, if there is even the slightest chance of something coming up on a test, there's an annotation for that.

Once I got over my initial amusement, I realized that this might well be why I was averaging a "B" in University. Sure, I believe that one set of text is enough for any work of classic literature, and still maintain an anti-annotating policy when it comes to my treatment of my personal library. But trying to climb a ladder without stepping on some rungs is as ludicrous as an egg-free omelette. Perhaps if I had been a bit more ruthless with my own books--allowing my handwritten observations to coexist with the retyped words of Milton, Faulkner, and Swift--my  grades would have gone up. And from, there, who knows? Better career prospects? A better life? Enough money to buy full-priced books on Amazon?

I do not know who my mysterious annotator was, and so I cannot say for sure that he or she has ever won a Pulitzer, but I have witnessed a work-ethic that puts my own University-self to shame, or at least mild insecurity. One should always strive to do one's best, of course, and I always thought that I was. But it's a humbling experience to realize just how much better the other guy's best was.