I went to the San Francisco Symphony concert last night (Friday, March 30) in order to hear the Sibelius First Symphony, for which I had written the program notes. Because what with one thing and another I was going by myself, I had an interesting opportunity to sit in the hall quietly before the concert, and during the intermission, and just watch people as they flipped through Playbill and eventually began reading the program notes. (Usually sociability precludes anything like this.) I could tell easily when they were on mine given a large reproduction of a painting of Sibelius and friends which dominated one page.
This is an interesting experience denied to most writers. After all, we usually find out about people reading our work after the fact. Instead, I was watching them actually read it in front of me — hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. I was really quite surprised to see how many people really were reading them. At one point I was completely surrounded by people reading my long article on the symphony, everybody at a different place in the document and, I suppose, having a slightly different reaction. And there I sat in the middle, the author of the article they were reading, and nobody knew it.
(Probably for the best…who knows what they really were thinking…)