Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

Author:Anne Fadiman [Fadiman, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary Criticism, Essays, Books & Reading, Literary Collections, Books and Reading, Fadiman; Anne
ISBN: 9780374527228
Google: hxcE7vJdgZkC
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1999-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

My own power mower, George, does not understand the thrill of such discoveries.. He does not think me a lovable helpmeet when I wander past his computer screen and find my fingers, as if animated by an inner gremlin, inserting a second r in embarass. I am certain, however, that the gene has passed to our six-year-old daughter. She can’t yet spell well enough to correct words, but she has definitely inherited the proofreading temperament. When she was two and a half, George said to her, pointing at our bird-feeder, “Look, Susannah, a rufous towhee!” Susannah said, witheringly, “No, Daddy, a rufous-sided towhee.” It is only a matter of time before she starts adding those missing r‘s herself.

After our family dinner, I asked my mother if I could borrow her envelope of clippings from the Fort Myers News-Press. I spread them out on a table at home. There were 394. (What kind of person would count them? The daughter of the kind of person who would clip them, of course.) The offenses included fifty-six disagreements between subject and verb, eight dangling participles, three improper subjunctives, three double negatives, twelve uses of “it’s” for “its,” three uses of “its” for “it’s,” three uses of “there” for “their,” three uses of “they’re” for “their,” and one use of “their” for “they’re.” Hunters shot dear; lovers exchanged martial vows; mental patients escaped from straight jackets; pianos tinkered; and Charles celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as the Prince of Whales. “There’s a huge demographic out there,” commented the News-Press film critic, “who appreciate good film and shouldn’t be taken for granite.” Even before I bumped into the large boulder at the end of that sentence, I had the feeling that I was reading a language other than English. I vowed I would never again take an intact declarative sentence for granite.

Swallowing 394 errors at a sitting gave me indigestion. One is enough. One is delicious. One is irresistible. My former editor John Bethell, who admits to sharing my compulsion, says that when a typo swims into his field of vision, he can’t not notice it. He remembers his first act of proofreading—at age seven, he saw a sign in a shop window that read DIABETEC FRUIT—and recently restrained himself from correcting VINAGER on a grocery-store sign only because he feared that passersby might think he was a graffiti vandal. The Bethell family, like the Fadiman family, presents irrefutable proof that the trait is genetic. John’s father, an architect, was, in effect, a proofreader of visual details. If a guest moved an ashtray a quarter of an inch, he descried the repositioning and rectified it instantly. John’s daughter, Sara, manifested the gene at an early age by stopping at dammed-up streams during family hikes and removing all the dead leaves. Sara grew up to be a copy editor, a profession she compares to walking behind an elephant in a parade and scooping up what it has left on the road. Her prize find, to date, was

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