❦ incipit

This is eesugi, a record of records. What follows is the marginalia of one librarian, kept across thirty-eight years of cataloguing books that other people stopped writing. The hand that annotates here is not always mine. The pages tilt because the desk has tilted. Read in any direction. Begin where you wish.

f.1r · MMXXVI · primavera

❦ on the temptation of margins

A marginal note is the shortest distance between two minds, and the longest survival of either. The book ages, the reader dies, the binding gives, the spine cracks, the type foxes. But the pencil mark in the margin — the careful underline drawn against a sentence in 1893, the question mark answered seventy years later by someone the first reader never met — outlasts almost every part of the artifact that contained it.

I have noticed this across thirty-eight Augusts of cataloguing. The book that comes to me most damaged is most often the book most loved, and the book most loved is the book most marginalized. Marginalia are the readers' final correspondence. They are the sentences nobody else was meant to read.

There is a temptation, when one has spent a life in the margin, to mistake the margin for the page. I confess to this. I have written — in graphite, never in ink — across the white spaces of three hundred and forty volumes that did not, strictly, belong to me. Many of these volumes have since been sold to other libraries. Some are still in the closed stacks at Daegu, beneath the heating duct. The notes are still there.

❦ a catalogue of unfinished

Twenty-eight one-line entries, from the closed stacks. Each began. None ended.

  1. iA Treatise on the Migration of Cranesmanuscript, ink and graphite, 41 leaves, abandoned at chapter VII, 1903
  2. iiBriefe an einen Sohn, der nie gelesen hatGerman, octavo, 88 leaves, water damage to final quire, 1948
  3. iiiNotebook of Botanical Failuresleather quarto, pressed specimens loose, 1911—1939
  4. ivThe Habits of the Yalu River, Vol. IIVolume I extant; Volume II broke off mid-sentence, 1957
  5. vDiary of a Translator Who StoppedKorean and Japanese, 192 leaves, last entry 22 March 1972
  6. viField Sketches, Cheju Provincegraphite, 14 leaves of plates, no accompanying text, 1967
  7. viiAn Inventory of Smaller Soundstypescript with ms. corrections, ends mid-list, 1981
  8. viiiLetters to My Mother, Heldnever sent, never sealed, 34 leaves, 1959—1962
  9. ixVocabulary for the Sea at Nightsingle quire, 12 leaves, last word: amber, 1955
  10. xA Brief History of the Bookbinder's Handpaper duodecimo, foreword only, 1929
  11. xiRecipes My Aunt Could Not Recallbrown ink on rice paper, 7 leaves, undated
  12. xiiThe Notation of Bellsstaff paper with vernacular notation, 19 leaves, 1944
  13. xiiiMarginalia of Marginaliaprinted octavo over-marked in three hands, abandoned 1976
  14. xivThe Index of My Father's Silencessingle sheet, fold-out, 1973
  15. xvAufzeichnungen, sehr kurzGerman, pamphlet, 6 leaves, attributed to Hbr., 1962
  16. xviDrafts of an Apology, Withdrawn11 versions of one letter, 1986
  17. xviiThe Cataloguer's Cataloguein progress, 38 years, never to be closed
  18. xviiiSongs Heard Through a Wallgraphite transcription, 23 leaves, undated
  19. xixA Glossary of Provincial Weatherduodecimo, A—K only, 1939
  20. xxThe Lost Postscriptsingle leaf, found loose in another book, undated
  21. xxiSketchbook Without a Subject88 leaves of negative space, 1980
  22. xxiiThe Long Caesurapoem in 14 fragments, never assembled, 1990
  23. xxiiiMemoirs Toward a Memoryhalf-bound octavo, ends mid-paragraph, 2002
  24. xxivThe Ledger of What Was Almost Saiddouble-entry, columns blank on the right, 1995
  25. xxvAn Atlas of Backyards17 hand-drawn maps, all of one neighborhood, 1968
  26. xxviConversations With My Younger Self, Refuseddouble-spaced typescript, 41 leaves, 1999
  27. xxviiThe Practitioner's Reluctancetrade pamphlet, never printed, plate-proofs only, 1984
  28. xxviiiNotes for a Final Leafmanuscript, in progress, this volume

❦ the original hyperlink

Before the underlined blue word, before the cursor's small white index, there was the manicule — the hand that the reader drew in the margin to point at what mattered. The manicule predates the printed book. It is older than the codex. It is, in the truest sense, the first interface for jumping from one place in a text to another.

In my catalogues I have counted, conservatively, eleven thousand manicules. Some are signed; most are anonymous. The earliest in my care, dated 1487 by the dealer who sold us the volume, is drawn in lampblack with a fingernail still visible at the index — the artist could not stop himself from including the truth of his own hand. The latest, in a 2018 photocopy of a regional planning document, was drawn in ballpoint by a city councilor who has since died.

Touch the hand. The page tilts back at you, the way a book tilts when a finger is placed at the page-edge to steady it. Then it returns. This is the only thing on this site that responds to your presence. — go on, the hand is not shy.

❦ the binders, anonymous

A book is two writings. The first is the author's. The second, almost always uncredited, is the binder's — the one who folded the printed sheets into quires, sewed the quires together along the inner edge, glued or laced the spine, mounted the boards, covered the boards in cloth or paper or leather, lettered the spine, and gave the sheaf its name as an object. Without the binder there is only paper. With the binder there is a book.

In thirty-eight years of cataloguing I have learned the names of seventeen binders by the texture of their stitch alone. Most binders sign nothing. They are anonymous co-authors of every book they have made. The catch-stitch above this paragraph is the only piece of binder's evidence I have preserved on this leaf — the threading visible because the cover was lost in transit, and the binding came to my desk naked, with its own work showing.

❦ a register of pairings

Two names that sat on the same shelf, in the same hand, on the same afternoon.

  • Sebald & Bernhard
  • Borges & Bioy
  • Hwang & Ko
  • Aurelius & Rilke
  • Akhmatova & Tsvetaeva
  • Bashō & Sora
  • Pessoa & Reis
  • Han & Chŏng
  • Ginzburg & Pavese
  • Bishop & Lowell
  • Ko Un & Sŏ Chŏngju
  • Robert Walser & Kafka

❦ a question, unanswered

In the autumn of 1973 — I was eleven, my father was forty-six and the slow ache that would carry him off was already starting in his lower back, though we did not know — I asked him, in the doorway of the small room where he kept his correspondence, whether a person could love a book more than they loved the people the book was about. He paused. He looked at the floorboards. He shifted the volume he was carrying — it was the second of three — under his other arm. He did not answer. I waited. He went into the room, closed the door, and from the other side of it he said only: that is a difficult question, my child. let me think a while.

He did not come back to it that day. I did not press it the next. Within four years he was gone. I have, since 1977, asked the question of myself in his absence. I do not yet have his answer, but I have an interrobang to mark the place where it would have lived.

❦ one entry, expanded

The hierarchy is intentionally inverted. Below, the footnotes are the body. The body is the citation.

Han, S.1 Aufzeichnungen, sehr kurz.2 Daegu3: privately printed,4 1962.5 Pamphlet, 6 ll.6; ms. corrections in graphite throughout.7

  1. 1 Han Su-gi, fictive proper name, the librarian-narrator of these leaves; also (per a competing tradition that I cannot confirm) a Suwŏn-born bookbinder who signed her work S.K. The two persons may be one. They may not. The difficulty of disambiguation is itself the subject of much of the marginalia I have catalogued in this volume.
  2. 2 Aufzeichnungen, sehr kurz: lit. Notes, very short. The German title is the only feature of the pamphlet that is in German. The interior is in Korean and a transliterated mixture of Korean and Japanese, occasionally lapsing into a private orthography that has resisted six decades of decipherment.
  3. 3 Daegu, sometimes Romanized Taegu; the third-largest city in the south of the peninsula. The relevant neighborhood here is the one east of the train station, where for two decades a small lending library operated on the second floor of a bakery. The library closed in 1989. The pamphlet was found in the eaves during demolition.
  4. 4 Privately printed: meaning, in this case, hand-set on a Vandercook 4 in a basement on a sheet borrowed from a coal merchant; bound in oat-paper covers stitched with linen thread; impression unknown but presumed under twelve copies. Of those twelve, this one is the only known surviving copy.
  5. 5 1962 — also the year of the interrobang's invention by Martin K. Speckter, an American advertising executive. There is no documented connection between the two events.
  6. 6 6 ll.: six leaves, twelve pages, of which two are blank. The first leaf is missing its lower-right corner, where a small triangular bite has been taken out by either a bookworm or a careful child.
  7. 7 The marginal corrections are in three distinct hands. The earliest hand uses a soft 4B pencil. The latest hand — which appears only on the verso of leaf 4 — uses iron-gall ink and writes in a schoolgirl's careful italic. The middle hand, which appears most frequently, is identical to the hand that has corrected the catalogues in my own care since 1988. I have not yet identified myself.

hic explicit.

eesugi, MMXXVI.

Here it ends. The bottom is the bottom. There is no door to the back of the room; the room is the page; the page closes itself.

Han Su-gi, librarian, retd.

f.1184v · explicit