It’s relatively common, I find, when opening a newly purchased second-hand book for the first time, for something to fall from its pages. Most likely this will be a branded bookmark or printed stocklisting paper from the dealer who sold it. But it’s not unusual to find something more interesting, something belonging to the book’s previous owner.
Apparently the singer Nick Cave donated 2,000 books to an Oxfam in Hove this summer, and new owners of his paperbacks discovered old plane tickets and Post-it notes tucked inside. We serial readers of actual physical books are constantly in need of bookmarks and will grab at anything to hand to use as one. And once inserted, such improvised bookmarks can remain there for years, or even decades, until a new reader comes along to rediscover them.
In recent years the literary objets trouvés I’ve found have included a Dublin bus ticket from the 1970s, a flier from the London rave scene of 1990 and an uncashed book token from 1962. Then there are items I have left behind in my own books, only to rediscover them years later: a forgotten photograph, a ticket to a play or gig from days long gone. A couple of years ago I discovered in this way a postcard that I had sent to my mother from a road trip in north Scotland in August 1993. It immediately transported me back there: drinking whisky in a tent in the rain, zipped tight against midges, above a beach in Lochinver. (I excitedly sent a picture of the postcard to my companion from that short holiday only to find that not only did he not remember that evening but he had no recollection of the entire trip. Memory is a strange thing.)
But my most recent discovery inside a second-hand book was perhaps the most striking so far. I had ordered a book a friend mentioned that he thought I would like, Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, released in 1979. The book’s back story was certainly eye-catching: Hardwick had been married to the poet Robert Lowell, who left her in 1970 to move to the UK, where he fell into a relationship with a bohemian heiress. But Hardwick and Lowell remained oddly tied to each other, and in 1977 he was on his way back to her – only to have a heart attack in the taxi from the airport to her New York apartment, and die.
Sleepless Nights was written soon after all this and is very much a book about memory (and not about much else – there is very little in the way of conventional plot or events). But before I could get to Hardwick’s confection of reminiscences of Kentucky, New York and Europe from the 1940s to the 1970s, I was sent in another direction. Because when I opened the book, a postcard fell out.
This postcard featured an antique image of the India Gate war memorial in Delhi. The card is stamped 1997, but the postcard itself feels considerably older – as if it had been sitting in a shop rack for many years before it was finally purchased. It is addressed to a Ms Annette Bloodstein in Willow Street, Brooklyn, New York, with a handwritten dateline: ‘Jan 25, 1997, New Delhi.’
The text reads: ‘Dearest Annette, Let me wish you first a belated “Happy Birthday”. Received your letters. I am so sorry that I could not write to anyone. I am involved with many things. Hardly I can make any time to myself. I regret of my coming back to this country. I miss you terribly. I plan to go back to N.Y. Aug/Sept 97. I am afraid whether I will be able to visit Bangalore in Feb. But I will try. Spoke to Khuku about it. I am OK. I miss you a lot. I will go to Calcutta in mid Feb. My shipment has come. Love Beena.’ It’s written in biro but a second pen, a darker felt tip, has been used to mark it AIR MAIL and URGENT.
The card is stamped 1997, but the postcard itself feels considerably older – as if it had been sitting in a shop rack for many years before it was finally purchased
The card’s short message raised more questions than it answered about both sender and recipient. But Google came to my assistance on the latter – as Annette Bloodstein was quite easy to identify. And she had had quite a colourful life. Born in the Bronx, Annette was a gifted student, taking not one but two Masters degrees, in speech pathology and vocational rehabilitation. She then worked as a highly regarded speech therapist in Brooklyn, breaking off only to support the war effort by working in a factory assembling fighter aircraft – while her husband flew the same in the war on Japan in the Pacific.
Her obituary notes: ‘She travelled to India on many occasions over the years, where she was spiritually uplifted by the teachings of Sathya Sai Baba.’ Was this how and where she met Beena, the more mysterious party of this postcard pair? Did they meet again after January 1997 as Beena intended? Who was Khuku? There simply aren’t enough clues to find out any more about Beena, unfortunately.
Annette died on Thanksgiving weekend in 2016, aged 95 – outliving Elizabeth Hardwick who had died nine years earlier at 91, also in New York and in the same week of early winter. Who knows if writer Hardwick and reader Bloodstein ever met, but certainly they shared the same orbit for many years, so it’s not inconceivable that they could have. The postcard had also been around the world: from Delhi to New York initially, before it somehow made its way to Berlin and the dealer who I had ordered my copy of Sleepless Nights from, who then posted it to me in London.
In a curious coincidence, the very next book I read, J.L. Carr’s A Month in The Country, featured a passage that alludes to oddments found in books. This classic elegiac novel, written in 1978 and published in 1980 (and so an exact contemporary of Sleepless Nights), sees a young, first world war-traumatised artist fall in love with the local vicar’s wife, a love he is unable to consummate and remains haunted by for 60 subsequent years.
The novel’s love object grows roses and is given to cutting a fresh flower to put under her the band of her hat each day. At one point she passes that day’s flower to the lovestruck narrator and, naturally, he decides to keep it. ‘That rose…’ Carr writes. ‘I still have it. Pressed in a book… Someday, after a sale, a stranger will find it there and wonder why.’ This is exactly what happened to me with Beena’s urgent message to Annette – and Carr was right in that I wonder about it.
Another writer I’ve come across recently who has highlighted the poignant in-book discovery is the poet Douglas Dunn. In his Elegies, a collection in memory of his wife Lesley who died in 1980, the opening poem, ‘Re-Reading Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories’, sees him reopen that book after more than 20 years: ‘Here is a green bus ticket for a week in May, my place mark in “The Dill Pickle”. I did not come home that Friday. I flick through all our years, my love, and I love you still. These stories must have been in my head that day, falling in love.’
There is a popular social media account which regularly shares morsels from found postcards – an antique image of a card with a line or two from the text on the back. I have often found them charming, but the regularity with which the authors discover quirky messages has led me to wonder if they are all genuine. The card to Annette Bloodstein from Beena, though, certainly is – a real postcard from the past that provides a mysterious glimpse of a relationship from a time long gone.
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