After escaping the office on Friday I made my way down to the airport to pick up Nara-noona (from my APEC YP team) from Terminal 1. We walked around a bit at Bugis, where I took her on a short detour to the Central Library and got myself a yellowed copy of The Book of the New Sun: Sword and Citadel. Yes, I’m terrible at being a tour guide.
I started flipping through the book on the long ride home from Bugis when I noticed that someone had scrawled under the title on the inside cover: “Simply incomprehensible! – The Straits Times, 1994″. How terrible to deface a library book. Much worse than our idea to write “Please. It’s not gonna happen. – Geoffrey, ISB’10″ on a Penn napkin from an alumni gathering I crashed and slip it into the Central Library copy jacket of Running of the Bulls, at least from a library etiquette perspective. We didn’t because it would’ve been too cruel (but probably not as cruel as their inevitable disappointment).
What’s odd is that the copy I got was the Fantasy Masterworks 2000 reprint, which was originally published in its component books in 1982 and 83. So where did this 1994 come from? Surely it’s not the date that the graffiti artist decided to leave his comment, so was it just random or is there some special significance I don’t see? Or is it a commentary on the level of literary appreciation at the ST? Simply incomprehensible.
