I’ve spotted a subtle side-effect of the fact that e-Books don’t actually exist. The ‘not being able to lend a book to your husband/friend/etc when you’ve finished it’ problem is well-known. But less obvious is the fact that when you read a book on a Kindle or an iPad, you can’t accidentally leave things between the pages for subsequent owners to find. Because, of course, there won’t be any subsequent owners. One of the joys of a secondhand book is unexpectedly chancing upon someone’s makeshift bookmark trapped between pages 118 and 119.
A friend recently gave me, as a present, a copy of More Manners for Men, one of those bum-clenchingly snobbish etiquette guides from yesteryear. The specific ‘yester’ in this case was 1908. As if the text itself wasn’t entertaining enough (‘asparagus seems to have been a stumbling-block to many’), it was thrilling to find a small grey and white feather between the pages. Fascinating to think not only of the reader who placed it there over a century ago, but also of the bird (pigeon, I’d say) who donated it.
When London’s Guildhall Library took custody of Elizabeth David’s personal collection of cookbooks they found several copies she’d been sent by newspapers to review. Her handwritten judgments were still inside, full of crossings-out and substituted words as she strove to be fair. Correspondence between her and the newspapers showed she preferred writing no review to a bad one.
The unanticipated leaf-lurker must be a perk of the job for secondhand bookshop owners. A friend of mine in the trade, knowing that I write for The Spectator, showed me one of the magazine’s flyers he’d found sandwiched in an old book. It was a cartoon of a cricketer about to bowl the ball, captioned ‘first class delivery’ and offering a year’s subscription for the equivalent of 84p an issue. Part of the fun of these finds is trying to date them from the sums of money involved. Late 1980s on this one, I’d guess.
Sometimes it feels almost like prying. In an old copy of The Day of the Jackal I found a newsagent’s bill from 1972 (the year after the novel was published). The knowledge that Mr Blangdon of Hampton in Middlesex spent £2.08 on papers between October 14th and November 4th seemed indecently intimate. Being handed his birth certificate, National Insurance number and credit card details wouldn’t have felt half as invasive.
The most poignant discovery I ever had was in a biography of Eric Clapton. It was a postcard, only a few years old, from a Greek island to an address in the Home Counties. For something to do I posted it back to the same address, enclosing a note about where it had been found. Several days later the phone rang, and a middle-aged man thanked me for returning the card. ‘The book was my son’s,’ he explained. Something about the ‘was’ sounded ominous. Sure enough, it turned out the son (who must, I worked out, have been in his twenties like me) had died. It felt wrong to ask how, but nevertheless the story was there — two young men, both interested in Eric Clapton, both reading the same copy of the same book about him. Even now, whenever I’m searching for a book and see that biography’s spine, I think of its previous owner. And of his father.
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