Mysteries of the Mercantile

 

One of those intriguing fragments found folded in the pages of a Mercantile Library book that reminds you of just how many sets of eyes have traveled those pages before you.  Don’t worry, we won’t put on the blog anything you leave in a book .  Clever Betsy by Clara Louise Burnham and Sally Bishop weren’t published until 1910.  My guess is that this reading list is almost 100 years old.  Many Merc members keep reading lists today.  I’ll leave the questions of how and why we read to Sven Birkerts and friends, but certainly, we do it for many reasons and, confronted by our own mortality in relation to speed, personal vagaries and vicissitudes, trash-urge vs. trash-threshold, it amounts to a pretty complex equation that is best forgotten.  Who was Mrs. R. Levi, patron L 37, and what made her tick?  Did she ever read The Militants, or was it perhaps not to her taste? What’s on your reading list?

-Ed Scripsi