I picked up the book with the teal cover. The pages were the color of tea on, and their edges began to crumble as I flipped through the book. The year was 2007, and I was living in Paris studying at the Sorbonne. I was taking a class, the philosophy of art, and while it was in French, sometimes I snuck in an English translation here and there. This book wasn't actually on the list of required reading, but I had heard about it, and when I saw it at the secondhand bookstore in Montparnasse, I quickly plucked it from a pile and paid two euros for it. That book was Against Interpretation.
That was 17 years ago; I still have the exact same copy of the book. The cover is cracked in half, so today when I reread “Notes on Camp,” I have to hold it very carefully.
“Looks like it's time for a new copy," a friend once said when he saw the book, whose teal cover has perhaps lost a bit of its vibrancy from too many years sitting in the sun on my various kitchen tables. But buying a new copy of Susan Sontag's most famous book doesn't feel right. Maybe there's something to be said for the relationship we have with a specific copy of a book; it almost seems like if I were to read any other copy of Against Interpretation than the busted one I've toted around with me for nearly two decades, I would be reading a different book. I don't like the idea of reading the book’s words, some of which I know by heart, in a different font, on paper that is white and not brown, in a book with a spine that is not cracked in half. It would be a different experience. I sort of chuckle as I write this, because in a way, my insistence on this original interpretation or experience of her writing in this specific copy, is proving the essential point that she makes in the book's title essay. But you’ll have to read it to understand what I mean.
-Eugenie Dalland