"For Shit Head. Best Wishes."

SIGNING BOOKS is a weird business I've never fully understood. On the one hand, I guess I get the point—a book with a real author's signature is proof that the author himself actually held that book in his own hands (if briefly) at some point, perhaps even meeting (if briefly) the owner of the book.

I know some authors who, if asked, won't sign their books for one reason or another. I used to think they were just arrogant and snotty, but now I more fully comprehend what they might be thinking. (At the same time, I freely admit that I'm awfully proud of the autographed editions in my own library. I have a bunch.)

My biggest problem is that I never know what to write when someone asks me to sign something. Just signing my name seems kind of cheap. A longer inscription of some kind not only personalizes the whole deal somewhat, it also lowers the resale value of a book, increasing the chance that the owner might hang on to it longer.

I've met several authors over the years who, while happy to sign books, refuse to sign their name alone for just that reason. Some even used that to their advantage. Once, while getting Allen Ginsberg to sign a book for someone else, he told me, "I won't sign it unless I know who I'm signing it for." When I gave him a woman's name he seemed disappointed. Then, with a leer, he went on to ask me my own name, and told me that he was looking for a new "personal assistant." Not only did I leave the brief encounter feeling a little skeevy, I also soon discovered that he'd misspelled the woman's name in the damn book.

I run into trouble with those longer inscriptions. You figure it's something that's going to be in a book forever, so you want to make sure you write something pithy and clever and memorable. I'm not good with the quick and pithy line. I tend to ramble. Worse, my ramblings are boring:

For Jason,

Well, thank you for buying this book and…I hope you enjoy it and...I see you're growing a beard now. I hope that works out for you…

Etc.

Plus, my handwriting's piss-poor, and too often I make mistakes and have to cross things out. (On a few occasions, while doing the signing alone, either in my office or at home, I've even made such a hash of things that I've been forced to rip out the title page and start again on another.)

All of this started coming to mind a week ago, when the first copies of my new book arrived from my publisher. That first batch was accompanied by a note from my editor, requesting that I sign them for a few people who had worked on putting the book together. That was fine, until I saw that he wanted me to sign one of them to "Fuck Face." I gave him a call, asking him to promise me that I wasn't going to be unwittingly insulting someone I knew. It was a legitimate concern.

People requesting an insulting inscription might be something Don Rickles runs into a lot, but it came as a surprise to me. Especially the frequency with which it happens. After giving my very first public reading a few years ago, a young woman approached with a book and asked me to sign it "To Asshole." She explained that it was for an ex-boyfriend of hers. When I told her I wasn't sure I wanted to do that, she asked if I could instead "just write something nasty."

I don't get asked to sign things too often, which makes the frequency of the mistakes, gaffes and weirdies I run into all the more troublesome. People requesting rude inscriptions is one thing, but there's another side to it as well. Statistically, I've far too often ended up insulting people without realizing it until later. I once wrote something to the effect of "sanity is overrated" in a book about a long stay in a psych ward. After handing the book back to the middle-aged woman who asked me to sign it, I learned that it was for a friend of hers whose son had just been institutionalized, and was having a very hard time coping with it.

"Oh," I said.

After giving a reading in Madison several years back, an older, neatly dressed, soft-spoken gentleman who had been sitting in the back of the bookstore stopped by my table and explained that he, too, was a writer. In fact, he was there because he'd gotten his dates mixed up—he thought he was supposed to be giving the reading that night. Only after driving six hours from northern Wisconsin did he learn that his reading was in fact the following night.

He was very nice about the whole thing, though, even going so far as to buy one of my books. Then he asked me to sign it.

I was physically exhausted and fuzzy-brained that evening. I don't travel well, and hadn't eaten since early that morning. So when he handed me the book, I scribbled, without thinking, "always keep an eye on the competition." I don't know why I wrote that. It's not something I believe, or do. I think at the time I thought it was a funny joke, but knew immediately after he left that it probably wouldn't be taken that way.

That haunted me for years. Fortunately, I remembered the man's name, and so was able to go out and buy one of his books. I saw it as a small step toward karmic readjustment. Reading the book, however, only made things worse.

Upon first talking to him and learning that he was from northern Wisconsin, I assumed he'd written a book about fishing, forest management or maybe local shipwrecks. He never made it clear.

Well, as it happens, he was an academic who wrote short stories, most of which took place in and around the small northern town of Superior, WI, and most of which dealt with the Polish community up there. They were dark, grim portraits of sad people leading desperate lives. But the stories themselves were pretty remarkable. Much better than anything I could do, that's for sure. The prose was delicate and poetic, but had a hard edge to it. This made my snotty, unthinking inscription seem all the more crass.

After some searching, I was finally able to track down his address. Then, years after the fact, I sent him a note in which I apologized for my apparent arrogance, and praised his book.

I never heard back from him, though. It occurred to me later that he only bought my book in the first place that night as a simple writerly courtesy, and likely sold it or gave it away at the first opportunity. He probably had no recollection of our meeting (or my inscription) whatsoever, and upon reading my note, assumed it was from some delusional nutcase.

Just as well, I suppose.

Jim Knipfel's new memoir, Ruining It for Everyone, will be released May 6.