In a recent sale catalog, one bookseller apologized for the condition of a sixteenth-century volume as «rather soiled by use.» When the book was displayed the next year, the exhibition catalogue described it as «well and piously used [with] marginal notations in an Elizabethan hand [that] bring to life an early and earnest owner»; and the book's buyer, for his part, considered it to be «enlivened by the marginal notes and comments.» For this collector, as for an increasing number of...
