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A few days ago, a friend of mine commented on the stories of his library collection. Like most scholars of the academic humanities, I join him in having an extensive home library. Like his, mine is filled with stories, not only those within the books but those of how the books came to me. Some are simple enough, author to publisher to bookstore shelf to my home shelves. Others have been gifts, and so their stories are a bit more complex. One of the piece on my shelf is yet more complicated, and quite dear to me; my name is on it, not inside the cover but outside on the spine, and I hope to have others join it yet.

There are some others of the sort I have mentioned before, others whose pages have been marked by scholars who have gone before me. I have from them not only the benefits of teaching but of their own notes and notations. Were I a better reader than I am, I might be able to develop somewhat of their character and their scholarly process through examination of their marginal notes. Not all of what those of us who work in the academic humanities do reaches the pages we publish and that few others read. Most does not, actually, with pieces getting rejected and ideas explored and found lacking and others only fleetingly considered but soon forgotten because not written down or not read again once written. The marginalia only appears when the book is read; if the pages are not opened again for a while, the words they bear, inked from the press and from the pen of the purchaser, are also left entombed.

The exhumation of such words makes for interesting stories of the sort my friend discusses. The image of the book as mausoleum for the author (something that plays in part with Mark Edmundson and in part with the assertion by Barthes of the death of the author) is perhaps macabre, one that makes scholars of literature ghoulish, grave-robbers as often or more so than archaeologists (although without the fedora-and-bullwhip social cachet, more's the pity). But delving through dungeons and raiding the tombs of the long-vanished, searching for the knowledge and treasures hidden therein, makes for entertaining narrative. It is one of the primary plot-arcs of the role-playing game, from Dungeons & Dragons (which has the one in the name) through text-based video gaming through the raids of the MMORPG. A number of movies follow the idea, as well, and not only the Indiana Jones films or Tomb Raider. In a sense, the Christian resurrection narrative partakes of it, as well. Surely, then, those of us who root around among pages seeking our own treasures and looking to use them to make yet others can be forgiven for doing so. We but enact in practice what others fantasize; are we to be blamed because others do not themselves seek where we seek and find what we find?