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Why you should write in your books. Or, Talking Back to Aristotle and Loewy
By Ralph Caplan

My freshman year in college I took a philosophy course from a professor who began by announcing that no textbooks would be used in his class. Plenty of books were required, however. "I want you to come out of this course with the beginnings of a good library," the professor told us. "and textbooks have no place in such a library. Nothing in the world has less value than a used textbook."

So we were not assigned any books with titles like "Introduction to Philosophy," or "Foundations of Empirical Thought," written by scholars whose training and degrees presumably qualified them to interpret what thinkers thought. The books we read were original material, the works of the thinkers themselves: Plato, Aristotle, William James, Bertrand Russell, Albert North Whitehead, Kant, Descartes...

I argued with Plato, mocked Immanuel Kant, challenged the logic of William James, talked back to Aristotle. Of course they couldn't respond; but given the stupidity and naiveté of some of my comments, that was just as well. And it offered advantages the internet can't. The satisfaction of online exchange comes at a cost: the dead can't play. Sure, you can talk to Michael Beirut and Yves Behar. But you can't reach Raymond Loewy or Norman Bel Geddes in the blogosphere.

The professor's flattering assumption was that students were smart enough to confront ideas directly. Maybe we were, but this was heady stuff and tough to go through without the organizational crutch of a textbook author. I cannot imagine getting through it at all, had the professor not provided us with a tip: "Make each book your own," he exhorted, "by annotating and footnoting and indexing it for yourself."

It was a priceless piece of advice, and I followed it for most of my life, marking and indexing passages I liked, passages I didn't understand, passages I took strenuous issue with. And filling all available white space with ideas of my own. At about this time marketers were advertising products that were "personalized," which meant that for a fee you could have your monogram stamped on a watch band. A manufacturer of pens ran an ad crowing, "Now you can personalize your fountain pen!" leading E.B. White to write, "I would sooner Simonize my grandmother than personalize my fountain pen."

Yet what we were doing to books was making them truly personal. It strikes me now that we achieved something thought to be unattainable before the advent of the internet. Namely, interaction! True, students today can read something online and post a comment. Our technological tools were pretty much limited to pens and pencils—it was decades before highlighters appeared, and even longer before post-it notes were available. But if we couldn't post comments, we could at least register opinions with the same immediacy.

I argued with Plato, mocked Immanuel Kant, challenged the logic of William James, talked back to Aristotle. Of course they couldn't respond; but given the stupidity and naiveté of some of my comments, that was just as well. And it offered advantages the internet can't. The satisfaction of online exchange comes at a cost: the dead can't play. Sure, you can talk to Michael Beirut and Yves Behar. But you can't reach Raymond Loewy or Norman Bel Geddes in the blogosphere.

I don't know how applicable this technique is to design books, many of which are themselves so elegantly designed that marking them up would be a kind of vandalism. Yet consider, for example, the massive BAUHAUS volume designed by Muriel Cooper that dominated so many bookshelves in the 60's and still dominates mine, unread and almost certainly destined to remain so, as I suspect it is in almost every other household it inhabits. Attacking it with an inquisitive pen might be the most respectful way to treat it.

Historically of course philosophers expressed their ideas verbally. Designers don't necessarily write books and the best designers don't always write the best books. For subjects like Materials and Methods or Typography textbooks may be essential. But the approach to books that I learned in Philosophy 101 offers a rewarding way to attack such design classics as George Nelson's Problems of Design, Hideyuki Oka's How to Wrap Five Eggs, and Lewis Mumford's Sticks and Stones. Providing an intimate view of design history this approach records as well some history of your own. Years later you may read what you wrote and sigh in gratitude that no one else ever saw it.