Mark Twain, Self-Appointed Literary Critic
A trove of books owned by Mark Twain, which you can browse here, shows that he could not resist leaving comments and corrections throughout the margins of the many books he read. Given the tartness of his criticism, one wonders why Twain read these books to the end, though his explanation of why he once sat through a room-clearing piano performance provides a hint. “The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good,” he wrote. “Only the mediocre is unendurable.” All books were photographed with the permission of the The Mark Twain Library in Redding, Conn., which received the books from Twain when he moved to town.
I love this usage ridiculously much.
Unrelated: http://documents.nytimes.com/index.atom is interesting in its own right, if you don’t mind all the Atom.
