The Reader in Your Margins

The best books we've ever owned were secondhand. Someone had been there before us and left a trail in the margins: questions, arguments, the occasional exclamation point, a passage bracketed so hard the pen nearly tore the page. You could read the book and read its earlier reader at the same time. And the second reading was often the better one. You weren't alone with the text. Someone who had loved it was sitting just off the page, pointing.

That is what we set out to rebuild.

A classic, after all, is not a book you're supposed to read. It's a book enough people have loved to keep handing forward, from teacher to student, mother to daughter, stranger to stranger across a used-bookshop counter. The word carries a faint accusation, as if these were volumes you owed someone. They aren't. They're the ones that survived because readers refused to let them go.

Rebind is a library of those readers. For each book, we've asked someone who has spent real time inside it to walk you through. It's not a summary, and it's not a study guide. It's the company of a mind that knows the terrain. Salman Rushdie on Voltaire's Candide. Margaret Atwood on Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. Roxane Gay on Wharton's The Age of Innocence. Charlotte Gordon on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Derren Brown on Marcus Aurelius. John Banville on Joyce's Dubliners. They've been through these books many times, and they'll go through them again with you, this time out loud.

Here's how it works. Each book opens with an introduction: why this one, why now, why this reader. From there you can listen in on the conversations—the heart of it—where the guide reads closely and thinks aloud. Around those sit the essays: the world that produced the book, the questions readers actually arrive with (Is Frankenstein's monster really the villain? Why is The Golden Bowl so difficult? Did Hester sin alone?), and a plain answer to the questions everyone asks first: which edition to read and where to start.

And because no great book has ever stood entirely alone, we've built the rooms between them. In Conversation With is where one book meets another: Candide and the Meditations turning out to attack the same enemy; Frankenstein and The Scarlet Letter read as twin studies of what a maker owes the thing it makes. This is the part that surprised even us: how much these writers, centuries and continents apart, were arguing with one another all along.

Why do it this way? Because reading a great book alone is one thing, and reading it beside someone who loves it is another entirely. Company changes what you see. A hard book becomes passable; a familiar one becomes strange again. Our aim is not to explain these books until they're safe. It is to put the best possible reader in your margins and let the book stay as alive and unruly as it always was and as, we think, it always will be.

Some of what's here is open to everyone; some is for members, who make the rest possible. All of it is meant to be used the way you'd use a good secondhand copy: dip in, argue back, follow the underlines.

So don't start with the book you think you should read. Pick the one you've always meant to. Start there.