Hey, Book-ruiners, Dante—or my colleague—will find you!

This just in, from a colleague’s urbi et orbi e-mail message:

Dear fellow theologians,

In my recent research I have been reading up on Pauline scholarship (Dunn, Kim, Ridderbos, Turner etc.).  I have now come across several library books that have been considerably (although neatly and in pencil) marked up (underlining & margin notes) by an informed graduate student or faculty member (God forbid!)—some it would seem recently.  The comments give it away.  Please have the courtesy not to do so.  It’s easy enough to make a copy of the relevant chapter and make your marks rather than spoil the collection for others and posterity.  I bristled once when I noticed an adolescent familial relation of mine doing so with a library book.  I hope we’re more mature than that.  If not in this life (and I have a vivid imagination) I suspect at the very least there will be purgatorial consequences for such behavior.  Lord have mercy.

Take that! Lasciate ogni speranza… Oops, that’s over the entrance to hell.