An exuberant, expansive cataloging of the intimate physical relationship between reader and book
Letter to a Future Lover
Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries
- “Breathtakingly original. . . . As an essay collection, it’s magnificent; as a love letter, it’s a work of overwhelming devotion and generosity. . . . Letter to a Future Lover is a masterpiece, filled with compassion and brilliance.”—NPR
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.
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.
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About the Author
Credit: Patri Hadad
Praise
- “[Monson’s essays] ride against scheme, the strictures of genre and the assumptions of form. . . . Each entry asserts a future for old-fashioned reading.”—The New York Times Book Review
- “Letter to a Future Lover becomes an invocation from the present to a distant set of readers, the ‘future lovers’ of its title, reminding them, above all else, that we were here.”—David Ulin, Jacket Copy
- “Ander Monson brings a scavenger’s eye and romantic spirit to these funny, poignant pieces of history public and personal.”—The Barnes & Noble Review
- “Monson writes with an ease and enthusiasm. . . . Letter to a Future Lover finds a million paths to the same point — ‘The loss of things. A species a minute. A book a second.’ — but in doing so, it also enacts the magic of the written word.”—The Boston Globe
