Personalized Nonsense
Wednesday, December 04, 2013
I invented the above paragraph. La Purga de
San Benito is a
Spanish expression for a cure-all miracle drug that does not exist. The other
word that has a definite meaning is affidavit. But I have never accepted the
meaning behind medicated as it means nothing. A medicated substance is not a
medicine. I have often wondered why the 99.9% pure ivory soap that floats is
not 99.8 or 100% pure. Why is it that those recent surveys never tell you when
it occurred or where and by whom? And what is clinically proven?
And yet as my wife Rosemary and I try to avoid
the ads between listening to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC we are sent a barrage of
those terms that have no meaning. I end up clinically depressed.
To the nonsense words above I want to add
another one. The word is personalized.
In this scan of the title page of my first
edition of William Gibson’s Neuromancer I guess I can write:
1. It is personalized.
2. It is autographed.
3. It is dedicated.
4. It is signed.
It cannot be autographed as that in most
cases means that you go up to your idol and produce his or her book and say, “Will
you sign it for me?”
It cannot be because Gibson gave me the
book, I did not buy it.
Can it be personalized? If I write my name
on the book to signal that I am the owner is it personalized?
Can it be dedicated? Perhaps, but exactly
what does that mean? I took my personal copy of Peter Beales’s Classic Roses a
few years (before he died) when he came to Vancouver and asked him to dedicate it to my
granddaughter Rebecca who was not there.
If my Neuromancer is signed what can you
say of all that extra stuff? You can routinely go to a big box bookstore and
find a shelf full of already signed novels by famous authors.
I would like to point out that my first
edition Neuromancer is worth more than $1000 but that it would be worth more if
it had not been “written upon” by the author to that unknown person that I am. And
had I not opened the book at all, it would have been then be worth even more. An
unread book can be priceless to the buyer and the seller.
But what of the reader?
