I’ve never been one to get mad at a slightly used book. I am a proud owner of a library card and so it didn’t faze me when ordering books for this class when I had the option of a new $20 book or an $8 used book. But when I brought my copy of Zulus the first day of class I was shocked when I found messy pencil script across the blank spaces at the beginning of each new chapter. I was deciding if this was something I would be ok leaving on the page or if it was worth it to take a giant eraser to the writing. I chose to avoid the script, not even looking at it when I was reading, treating it as if it was not even there, and I probably would have kept my reading like that had it not been our assignment to figure out the reason why at the top of each chapter there is a paragraph that starts with “A is for…”.
What I discovered is that the seller of the book was trying to figure out exactly what I am trying to do in class. What I originally thought of as an annoyance has been a helpful tool that I was able to utilize to my advantage. Similar to another thing we discussed in class before we started reading Zulus, this book was an achieve. Their messy handwriting, their underlining, and the bending of page corners are all an achieve of the way that they understood the beginnings of each pages and because of that, how they looked at Zulus differently. This is what Joe Moran meant when he wrote on “knowledge transfer”. Without me even realizing it at first, I was influenced by the way the past seller had used and purchased the book. I changed the way that I went about reading this book because of the way the person before me had read the book.
Another part of me that changed because of the book that I had received was how I wrote in the book. Typically, my notes would be very minimal in a book, an underline or a highlight if anything, but where this book was different was that now I felt it was my responsibility to continue on with the work and the thought processes that the reader before me had done. I often found myself writing notes to their notes and underlining parts that they had written. Now, I feel so sort of respect to this used copy that I truly did not have before and plan on selling it again so hopefully some kid sitting in an English class somewhere in America can continue on with the work we have done and continue and grow with our understanding on the book.