Enemies of Books, Part 1

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” –Shakespeare, Hamlet

Everyone has lost at least one good book to the careless borrower. My mother is still waiting for a neighbor to return her copy of No Idle Hands: A Social History of Knitting. My battered paperback copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art is probably in Singapore (no, really, it is). And I only recently found for my father a replacement copy of Floating Palaces: New London to New York on the Old Fall River Line.

So when it comes to the enemies of books, the first to consider is people and you need to decide one basic thing: shall I lend my books or not? After that, if the answer is yes, or even sometimes, then you need first to get bookplates and then to create criteria for lending. Bookplates are a topic too large for this entry, so I'll look at criteria now instead.

First, to whom shall I lend? In general, I have learned not to lend to anyone whose home address I don’t know. Also, I will not lend to anyone whom I fear may lend my book on to a third person. This is how I lost my L’Engle. It started innocently enough when I lent it to a friend who sang in our church choir. When she finished it, though, another mutual choir friend asked to borrow it and, before I knew it, it had made the rounds of the whole choir, ending in the possession of one Corinne, who finished her bachelor’s degree at Berklee College of Music and returned to her native Singapore to begin her singing career. In retrospect, I don’t really regret that she should now have L’Engle’s reflections on faith and art, since she may well need them, after all. But still: Singapore.

Lesson learned.

Second, what shall I lend, or better yet, what shall I not lend? Losing the L’Engle book, which I had annotated and underlined, taught me never to lend a book I have annotated, since I only annotate the books I know I will go back to. In A.L. Humphrey’s wonderful 1897 book The Private Library, he looks at this rule from a slightly different (Victorian?) angle, saying: “If you are in the habit of lending books, do not mark them. These two habits together constitute an act of indiscretion” (24). This does make sense. Marginalia often comes from the heart. How much do you want to reveal, and to whom? (I may have to write more about this later, including the potential joys in buying an annotated second-hand book, which can be quite amusing, though of course, the annotater is forever unknown and safe from my knowledge of his or her “indiscretion.”)

Third, given that L’Engle’s book was out of print, and it took me about seven years to find another copy, I have learned not to lend books that are out of print, over 70 years old, in fragile condition, or in some other way one of a kind, irreplaceable.

Fourth, there are some books that want and need to be lent For the Good of Humankind and the Planet. Precisely which books these are depends on the person. I find I keep “lendiving” Richard Bach’s Illusions and Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris. My roommate can’t seem to keep a single copy of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. You have your Planetary Books, too. You know you do.*

In that case, I recommend, along with Mr. Humphreys, “It is better to give a book than to lend it” (24).


Humphreys, A.L. The Private Library. New York: J.W. Bouton, 1897.

*Tell me what they are and I'll do an entry just on Planetary Books.