Károly Tibor Goldman, better known to us as Roy Gold, was born on May 12th 1918, and died on his birthday ninety years later.

Arthur Rimbaud, *Reliquaire*, Léon Genonceaux, 1891

The once fine edition of Rimbaud's *Reliquaire* has been decorated with a Kandinsky-esque pattern of circles and lines in felt-tip pen, reducing its market value by about £6000.

…Roy seems to have taken as much pleasure from defacing his books as reading them — and on some occasions, perhaps more. But in a number of important ways, any disdain he might have expressed for the idea of books as objects rings quite false. Often the results of his efforts elevate the books rather than diminish them, and such is the extent of the collection that those books without his additions take on the effect of being, somehow, incomplete.

Bertram Park, *Roses*, The National Rose Society, 1963

Roy was a rose enthusiast and his garden contained few other flowering plants. The collection holds seventeen books on roses (that we have discovered so far), including five by Bertram Park, all of which have been elaborately modified.

"We should not be excessively interested in books", he wrote. "We should be interested in stories, in language, in ideas, in perception, in imagination, in compression. These things are in books but they are not books. If a student finds he has an overwhelming interest in books he should consider a future as a bookbinder."

Excerpts of text from: Remembering Roy Gold, Who was Not Excessively Interested in Books

By Nicholas Jeeves, via The Public Domain Review