“…there is nothing quite like an inscription in a book no longer owned by the dedicatee to capture the melancholy, the bittersweetness, of the passage of time, to recall us to our own mortality and to remind us of the vanity of so much of what preoccupies us.”
Speaking of mortality, Shirlee turns 40 today. Oh, and Theodore Dalrymple has more to say about book inscriptions here.
