Saturday, January 9, 2016

Lingering traces (and a big thank you)

First and foremost (I think I started my last post with those very words, so my creativity is at a low ebb, but the words are fitting nevertheless), I have to say that I was so grateful for all the many comments on my last post about the shift in focus I have in mind for this blog. I think I partly expected many people to react with, more or less, a "Well, that's that then. I can remove that blog from my list of online reading material," and I was very very very pleased that so many people chimed in with their encouragement and support. It really meant a lot to me and gave me a big boost in enthusiasm for the blog—and probably in all-around ego as well, but you'll have to ask Andy about that...

I also have to thank several of you who are bloggers yourselves for the invaluable advice about cutting down spam comments by adding a word verification requirement. I should have recalled that this was an option, or should have looked into my options more thoroughly and reminded myself of it, but perhaps I can say, as my excuse, that I was so swamped by spam comments that I didn't have the time to do my homework. At any rate, I turned on word verification two or three days ago and am delighted to report that a) several of you have successfully left comments since then, so it must not be too cumbersome to navigate, and b) that I have received not one spam comment since. Which has given me a whole new lease on blogging life, so thank you, thank you, thank you!

Now, I have already started to experiment a bit with ways of briefly reporting on interesting and relevant books I've read and any particularly profound (um, sure) thoughts I've had about them (concisely!!!), but this was a particularly crazy week at work, so a planned first attempt at such a post has been waylaid for a few days.

(Note to self: Instead of taking time off during the holidays next year, be kind to yourself and take the utterly mad first week of January instead, the week when everyone suddenly awakens from an eggnog- and Christmas cooking-enhanced stupor and realizes they've done no work since Thanksgiving, then panics and tries to catch up while manically attempting to keep irrationally glorious New Year resolutions that are, let's face it, doomed to fail in another week or two. Ugh.)

But over the past couple of weeks, I have been delving a little into books on my TBR shelves that I've been meaning to get to for ages (more on the actual reading soon), and I've come across a couple of interesting tidbits buried within the pages. I admit I first thought of a post about items found in my books a long time ago (and there's nothing whatsoever original about such an idea, of course, as numerous other people have done the same), but it somehow felt too forced at the time and I scrapped it. But having come across three rather evocative items in a short span of time, I figured I might as well share them.

Now I don't know if other people feel that some irrevocable meaning attaches to found items from the books in which they're found, or if such a daft notion would never occur to anyone but me. But I do.

So, for example, a bit of extra poetic meaning attaches to the fact that a ticket to a St. Martin-in-the-Fields concert, dating from 1994, wound up in my copy of E. H. Young's Miss Mole, acquired nearly 20 years later at a Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Big Book Sale.


I could almost imagine that a latter-day Miss Mole attended this concert and left her ticket behind. And of course the ticket made me yearn for London even more than I ordinarily am on any given day of the week.

And it's certainly not inappropriate that tucked inside my long-unread Virago edition of Dorothy Strachey's Olivia was a ticket (sadly undated) for the P&O European Ferries. Someone was taking this very short novel, about a British girl at a French boarding school, along with them on their journey from Portsmouth to Le Havre.


Nowadays, it looks like a similar ferry (P&O seems to no longer exist and the only ferries on this route are operated by Brittany Ferries) takes a little under four hours, so if the former owner of the novel was a fast reader, I hope he/she had other reading material as well or was planning for a little sightseeing or a nap along the way as well.

In view of the fact that the location in which a book is found adds meaning to the book for me, it is with regret that I admit that I can't recall for sure from which book the Du Maurier cigarette ad (or possibly an insert in the cigarette package itself?) came, but it's clearly rather old.


When was the last time the American or British government would have allowed an assurance, in a cigarette ad, that a particular brand of smokes "guards physical fitness"? Why, who knew? Smoking these cigarettes is practically good for you!

I'm including this item here with the other two because I recently came across it again, having obviously removed it from a book a while back in order to keep it from falling out and getting lost while I was reading the book. I put it in a safe place, but then forgot it there, and the rest is history. And I read so many old books that I have no clue now in which one it might have been nestled. 

But now that it has been found, I had to locate an appropriate new home for it. This is surely a problem few people would consider seriously, but I rather did. Finally, looking at my bookcase, and at the older books I have, I decided that, for me, Rosamond Lehmann somehow seems like a likely smoker, or at least an author who would have had a lot of smokers around her. So the cigarette ad's new home is my nice early copy of her novel, The Ballad and the Source.

And that’s enough of that for now. If I went through all the books on my shelves, I would find dozens more such things, so perhaps I'll do a bit more digging someday. Meanwhile, I'll get back to thinking about a workable "book report" post. Hopefully coming soon...

16 comments:

  1. You've reminded me of a series I started on my blog called 'Things found in books'. Never the legendary slice of bacon but always something interesting. I must start posting those finds again ASAP!

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    1. Now I'm going to have to look back at your earlier posts, and I'll look forward to the new ones!

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  2. All my years working in libraries and never found a £5 note used as a book mark = Shame! Nor anything else of interest really.
    Love the cig. ad very, very un-PC

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    1. What a shame, Sue. (Although I don't mind not finding food or several of the other items folks have reported finding, so perhaps, all told, you should count yourself lucky!)

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  3. Lovely! Did you ever see the MetaFilter discussion of things found in books? http://www.metafilter.com/61017/things-found-in-books

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    1. No, I hadn't seen that, Cass--thank you for sharing it. Some crazy stories there that (if true) leave my finds in the dust. The cancer letter from 1924 is heartbreaking!

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  4. Who wouldn't want to go through word verification to comment, Scott, because it's my favourite kind, the Picture Quizlet. "Pick out the pictures with Trucks/Ice Cream/Trees in them. Like a children's puzzle book.

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    1. If I had the option, Susan, I would make it an "Identify the books NOT written by D. E. Stevenson." I know you'd have no problem with that one!

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  5. AS a librarian, I kept a small collection - everything from a piece of lime-green origami paper, to a piece of buttered what toast (well, OK, we didn't keep that!) to $400.00 in twenties (alas, the person came in and claimed it!) to a rather sad note, wherein the husband realized his wife was cheating on him while supposed to be at night school, and was breaking up.
    This was a fun posting today, Scott, thanks, on this gloomy and chilly (but so far, dry, Sunday!)
    Tom

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    1. Wow, Tom, the cheating note sounds almost as sad as the cancer postcard quoted on the site Cass mentioned above! All of my found items require me to imagine the stories of their previous owners.

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  6. In addition to things found in books, I enjoy "things written in books", particularly gift inscriptions or "this book belongs to", and so on, particularly when there are dates. I know it is supposed to decrease the value of a collectible book, unless the person who wrote was the author/illustrator or someone famous or some such, but I enjoy them all. I also like finding library cards with lists of borrowers or date due slips,
    to show how much/often a book circulated. It all helps me feel the history of the book and part of a set of people from different places and times who all enjoyed this same book.

    Jerri

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    1. Definitely, Jerri, I have some treasured inscriptions too. I think I mentioned a couple found in the last book sale. Though with possibly one or two interesting exceptions, I do not appreciate notes or highlighting in books.

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    2. I do agree. The worst example is a paperback copy of the Fontana edition of The English Air by D.E. Stevenson with all the "bad words" blacked out!!! Obviously owned by someone with a VERY broad definition of "bad".

      Jerri

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  7. I have a whole box full of things I've found in books. Most are boring but I keep them anyway. My favorite is a streetcar ticket dated December 3, 1941. The date being so close to Pearl Harbor makes me wonder about the owner and what happened to him/her.

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    1. Oh, that's a great one, Melissa! Does it say what city the streetcar was in?

      I feel I should look for more of mine now, but the problem is, since I feel that the items should remain in books, if I want to post more, I'm going to have to dig through my entire library (admittedly not a vast task, and probably an enjoyable enough one for a slow weekend afternoon, so perhaps...)

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  8. Unfortunately it does not. Something vague like "City Streetcar Service"

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