Personalization

The Book Inscriptions Project

This is amazingly cool. There's something about book inscriptions that transforms an otherwise unremarkable object into something incredibly personal. That we now have a web site that collects such inscriptions I think will become a huge resource for historians, sociologists and literary critics. It's not so much what you have in your library (while it is important) it also matter who gave you a particular book. There are a lot of questions one can ask of inscriptions and a lot of answers one can glean from the inscriptions.