Off the Shelf, the LA Times book blog, discusses the proper way to inscribe a book.
From the piece...
An inscribed book -- whether one is the author or not -- occupies a special place in the pantheon of personal belongings.
The kind words on my copy of "The Life of Poetry," by the late Muriel Rukeyser, recall the workshop I took with her at Manhattan's 92nd Street YMHA in 1975, the day she signed the book, and the intensity of the aspiring poets around the table.
The simple note, "To the Hoffmans, Dec. 4, 1991," in the crabbed script of Eudora Welty on her "Collected Stories," is a locket in which I carry the brief exchange I had with Welty about her rollicking "Why I Live at the P.O."
I think of a galley I signed for my bibliophile friend Tom who had 10,000 books in his small Manhattan apartment. When Tom died in 2004, his parents donated his library to a school in the Philippines. Somewhere, I like to think, a youngster is not only enjoying a narrative I've written, but also pausing to consider the friendship expressed on the galley's title page, beginning: "To Tom."
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