I discovered today that I misunderstood the story behind this piece of graffiti, one of my favorites. My impression was that Sid Branca had written it. The story behind it, in fact, is even better: apparently she said it really loudly on the third floor one day (breaking the silence of the reading room, that gravest of sins) and someone else wrote it down on the wall of a study carrel. I guess she didn’t even know that someone had done that until she came across the photo on Flickr.

I’d love to hear the story from the transcriber’s point of view. Did Sid’s statement express what the transcriber too was thinking about the girl in question? Did it just sound like a terribly pithy quote worth memorializing?