Extra-Textual Stories: The Odyssey

A couple times in the past year or two, I remembered my Extra-Textual Stories project, for which I've done only one book so far (F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby).  The idea behind the project is to appreciate the story of a book as a physical object, aside from the story contained in the text on the pages.  Since 10 March is to-morrow, I felt I should restart this project with The Odyssey (for reasons that will become clear later on).

I'm pretty sure I got my copy of The Odyssey (or, I should say, my first copy of The Odyssey) at a Half Price Books in southern Iowa sometime in the early 2000s (I think 2002 or 2003).  I'd heard of The Odyssey, but I didn't really know anything about it, so essentially I got it because I felt I should have been familiar with it but wasn't (although it would still be something like ten years before I actually read it).

I don't remember how much it cost, but I do remember that it was in the Penguin Classics section, which was incentive enough to get it because the Penguin Classics always lookt really impressive lined up on a shelf.

I first read this in college (during the spring 2013 semester, I believe), but I didn't really read it for college.  I was taking a class on James Joyce's Ulysses, in which there are references to The Odyssey, but since I hadn't read The Odyssey, I didn't understand a lot of them.  So I read the book in order to understand the allusions to it.

By this time, I'd also acquired a second copy of The Odyssey (Chapman's verse translation, which I decided to get completely based on Keats' recommendation of it in his "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer").  I decided to read this Penguins Classics edition because it was a prose translation (by E.V. Rieu), which I felt would be easier to understand than a verse translation.

Apparently, I have the 1978 printing.

When I started reading it, I noticed an inscription in the front cover:

March 10th, 1979
Happy Birthday, Ken!
Love, Cynthia + Scott

I'd been oblivious to this for as long as I'd owned the book.  The prices on the back cover (with the odd exception of the cost in the U.K.) had been scratched out (after an apparently unsuccessful attempt to obscure them with blue pen), which should have been some indication that this was a gift.

So now when it's 10 March, I sometimes think of the Ken to whom my copy of The Odyssey is inscribed and wonder whatever happened to him (and what sort of person he was to sell a book that was given to him as a birthday present with a lovely inscription in the front cover).