num_pages: 165
description: An exuberant expansive cataloging of the intimate physical relationship between a reader and a book.Readers of physical books leave traces: marginalia slips of paper fingerprints highlighting inscriptions. All books have histories and libraries are not just collections of books and databases but a medium of long-distance communication with other writers and readers.Letter to a Future Lover collects several dozen brief pieces written in response to library ephemera--with library defined broadly ranging from university institutions to friends shelves from a seed library to a KGB prison library--and addressed to readers past present and future. Through these witty idiosyncratic essays Ander Monson reflects on the human need to catalog preserve and annotate; the private and public pleasures of reading; the nature of libraries; and how the self can be formed through reading and writing.
language: English
title: Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries
publisher: Graywolf Press