ABSTRACT
One of my habits when acquiring a new book is to inscribe my name and the year inside the front cover. I am not sure why I do this beyond some vague impulse common to our era to archive our own lives. But actually, the inscription of the year is somewhat misleading as I may not read the book until many years after the purchase. Or more perversely, I may have already read it (a library copy perhaps) but decided it was later worth owning because it is a book I feel sure I will want to refer to or re-read in the future; or that I simply couldn’t afford to buy it at the time of reading. This discontinuity between the time of acquisition and time of reading overlies yet another discontinuity though; that between the year I obtained the book and the year it was published or printed. I have many second-hand books and even the new ones might have been printed a few years before I bought them. Most of the second-hand books will also have inscriptions made by their previous owner(s), or a price written in pencil by the bookseller and the pages will show various degrees of wear and tear. My books therefore, have at least three different temporalities: their production (which one could split again into original publication and re-print), their acquisition and their reading (which again, might be multiplied depending on how often they are re-read). Multiple temporalities overlaid in one object.
