Books You Liked So Much You Copied Them by Hand or Typed Them Up

Extollager

Extollager

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Over at the Edgar Rice Burroughs thread, a poster mentioned typing out someone's copy of one of ERB's novels that had to be returned.

The Edgar Rice Burroughs Thread

About 40 years ago, I did the same thing with a book of Lord Dunsany's poems. (In Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Mah tells of copying a friend's book of A Little Princess.)

I wondered if anyone else here at Chrons ever did this. Back in the day, photocopying a whole book might seem too expensive!

I suspect there are other Chrons people who've done this....
 
It was a tiny fraction of the whole book but I did copy out a truckload of E.E. Cummings poems from a library book of his Complete Poems. (There are a variety of "complete" volumes in varying degrees of "completeness" but this was the 1913-1962 one from HBJ. I just recently finally acquired my own copy.)
 
I used to copy lots of poems -- Robert Service, Poe, Longfellow, etc.

And one time I was forced to photocopy a book because it turned out to be too expensive to steal it from the library. This was a book written in the early 20th century, borrowed on interlibrary loan, which had last been checked out in 1940 and had never been read. I know it had never been read because it still had many pages attached from not being trimmed properly at printing. My mother and I decided to rescue it by "losing" it, under the assumption that when it was returned to the other library they would probably throw it out anyway. But they decided it was such a valuable part of their collection that they wanted over $80 for it. :rolleyes: So we photocopied it (had a big commercial photocopier at home because my dad was a repairman) and reluctantly "found" it. I still bet they threw it out when they got it back.
 
APOSTLES OF DENIAL by Edmund C. Gruss. Photocopied the whole thing at Kinkos, cost about 15 bucks. Probably broke a fistful of copyright laws.:eek:
 
I do not think I have ever done this for a full novel or book, but I have done it for some Byron and for some philosophy. There are a couple plays that I still would like to have fully memorized from start to finish, but I doubt it will ever happen.
 
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TheDustyZebra said:
I used to copy lots of poems -- Robert Service, Poe, Longfellow, etc.

And one time I was forced to photocopy a book because it turned out to be too expensive to steal it from the library. This was a book written in the early 20th century, borrowed on interlibrary loan, which had last been checked out in 1940 and had never been read. I know it had never been read because it still had many pages attached from not being trimmed properly at printing. My mother and I decided to rescue it by "losing" it, under the assumption that when it was returned to the other library they would probably throw it out anyway. But they decided it was such a valuable part of their collection that they wanted over $80 for it. :rolleyes: So we photocopied it (had a big commercial photocopier at home because my dad was a repairman) and reluctantly "found" it. I still bet they threw it out when they got it back.
Click to expand...

I actually did lose a university library's only copy of a book once. Charged me 300 USD, they did. I should have fought the pricing because there is no way Sylvia Plath's journal and letters was worth that much, but oh well. It was the last time I ever checked anything out from a library.
 
When I was a teenager I had quote books - notebooks full of stuff i'd read and liked. The only one that survives has some dune and dune messiah in it, some whale Nation, a few poems and some To
Kill a mocking bird. I'm okay with that selection...
 
The last book I wrote out was Janet and John. I was 6 years old and used tracing paper.
janet-john.jpg
 
The last one was Miss Marple's 4-50 From Paddington. It was just the start, but it is one of the most alive pieces of writings I have ever read so I wanted to study it more and write loads of notes.
 
Nope. I don't recall ever doing that.

Now imitating the style of writers, that I've done: Poe, Lovecraft, Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner, Henry James (mostly to mock and criticize with James, though).


Randy M.
 
I have. It's a hoot and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes pitch-perfect parodies. Not only did Beerbohm get the tone right, the thinking behind James' particular writing choices is spot on.

Randy M.
 
I only ever copied out one book completely and that was for an old project that Marcus Rowlands did on out-of-copyright books for a CD. The text has shown up in a couple of places since (most notably on gutenberg.au) but it seems to have been replaced by someone else's version now.
 
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