18:33, Friday 9 Jul., 2004 Link

Speaking of which (thanks Phil!), I appear to have mislaid my copy of Abstracting Craft. Which is more than annoying because a good number of the pages were turned over and I wanted to remember those places. You don't get the same kind of experience, or the same pages, on a second reading. It's likely I've got to a pub or shop or something with it, and I've asked you [you being any number of people] to stash it in your bag for a while, and then completely forgotten about it. If you have it, could you let me know please?

Alternatively I've lost it, which would be most upsetting.

Update. I found it. I found it as soon as I started frantically looking for another book (which, now, I swear I've lost, but it could turn up). Looking along book shelves is always like that. I get distracted by another book I'd forgotten about, thinking about that for a second but still scanning along the shelf, and end up not noticing the one I'm actually looking for, little blinks of attention that stop me seeing things. I'd looked in the most unlikely places too, but it was under a photo frame all along.

I do hate losing books. I turn the pages over in some kind of extelligence, storing the pops of inspiration I get in folded paper. For good non-fiction I think this is essential: The first reading gets inside your head and changes you, and if there weren't little anchors to the particularly great bits that emerge between you+text, it wouldn't be as much fun. Exceptionally good non-fiction is nothing like that. Each time you read it you get more out of it, it speaks on so many levels. At times like that I refuse to turn any pages down at all. Sometimes landmarks stop you reaching the in-between.