The Materialist Library Vol. 1
. . . as the traveler does not appropriate the route which he traverses, so the farmer does not appropriate the field which he sows.
—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? (1840)
It would be like supposing that a play of Shakespeare is changed when a reader spills his tea over a page.
—G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (1940)
And yet there are only so many copies. And they’ve all been read before. Even when no one has started, the reading precedes them — language is no private affair.
We never read alone. Many have walked the path before us (some leaving markers to help us on our way). Join your fellow-travelers in an act of communal reading (or collective literary criticism).
Language is the valley. Culture our path.
