Lost and Found
JA
August 02
Second-hand bookshops often yield surprising pleasures. Whatever you read or pick up has surely been read and handled by someone before you, and a moment of carelessness then can lead to serendipitous discoveries years onwards. Books, it seems, are used by many to store all sorts of personal paraphernalia from intimate notes to baseball cards, foreign currency to death notices, and even wedding rings. For a while now, a few sites have been cataloguing these literary finds and the results are at once touching, quizzical and deadly funny.
For example, there is this comment from a second-hand retailer in Illinois, via AbeBooks: ‘Inside an old children's book, I found a green card; on one side was written in a child’s print: “I love you, do you love me?” The answer was written on the reverse: “I hate you and nobody loves me.”’ And from another in Oklahoma: ‘Once I found two business cards carefully taped together. I picked at the edge and they came apart revealing a three-foot long accordionfolded panorama of 1970s pornography’.
But the best find so far is one from a site called Forgotten Books. In a 1990s edition of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day was this letter, written on two thick, personalised cards.
Dearest David,
I am returning the beautiful necklace you gave me – not as a gesture of finality of our friendship, but because it is a special token in your family and I could not in good conscience keep it. I hope you understand that I do and will care deeply for you and that I have every bit of confidence in the beauty of your unique David-ness. I am just selfishly at a point in my life at which I can not make the sacrifices and take the risks that are necessary to make any relationship that we would have work. We are both at such profound transition points in our lives, and our situations are too unstable to offer the foundation necessary upon which to build the tremendous life changes that we idealistically believed possible. I want to know and believe, as I think you do, that I will always be a loving and caring friend & confidante to you – I know you would reciprocate that. Thank you for remaining the David I will always adore! Your strength and beauty will perpetually preserve that.
Much love
Julia 4/5/00
Anyone who has read the novel will appreciate the irony here – Ishiguro’s book has similar themes of unrecognised affection and formality, and has at its centre the pressures of work and livelihood.
I also like this one – a postcard of a Texas Long Horn steer dated 1938, found in A Calendar of Dinners in 615 Recipes - Including the Story of Crisco by Marion Harris Neil.
Dear George,
Fellows like this one n the other side have become rare in Texas. Mrs. R- & Louise are wintering in Arizona; so I am pastoring all by my lonesome. Wish that you were here to cook some good Alligator steak for me. Hope that you folk are well. Be a good boy and meet us and your mother in Heaven.
H.S. Rinehart
And finally, here's one just for the plain looks of the paraphernalia found. An advertising pamphlet for The Betsy Flanagan Cocktail from The Roosevelt in New York, found in The Prairie by James Fenimore Cooper (I particularly like the cover ‘WHAT is a Cocktail?’).
Our Friends
- Overland
- Alien Onion
- Ampersand Duck
- Andrew McDonald
- A Pair of Ragged Claws
- Arts Victoria
- Australia Council for the Arts
- Ben Eltham
- Bookshow blog
- CAL
- City of Tongues
- Crikey
- darkly wise, rudely great
- David Astle
- Elmo Keep Does Stuff
- The Ember
- Fly the Falcon blog
- Going Down Swinging
- Griffith Review
- Hackpacker
- Harvest
- HEAT
- Island
- Killings blog
- Literary Minded
- Lorraine Crescent
- Lynden Barber
- Mandy Ord
- Marcus Westbury
- Matilda
- Meanland
- Melbourne University Publishing
- Mel Campbell
- The Monthly
- Musings of an Inappropriate Woman
- Oslo Davis
- Paul Callaghan
- Read, Think, Write
- Sleepers Publishing
- Sorrow at Sills Bend
- SPLOG
- Tom Cho
- Virgule
- Wet Ink
- Wheeler Centre
Comments
02 Aug 09 at 11:20
The other facet of secondhand books is the inscriptions. I used to work in Trades Hall and we had a big used book sale each year. It was remarkable how often you would find flyleafs on which had been written something about never forgetting someone or another. Usually, the books had been given to us for nothing.
...02 Aug 09 at 11:27
I once had a friend who signed a whole lot of copies of his book, at his book launch, for journalist friends, only to find them in his local second -hand bookshop a few weeks later. He was most upset.
...02 Aug 09 at 11:41
That's such an Ishiguran letter... I wonder if he (or whoever) put it in that particular book on purpose...
...02 Aug 09 at 12:00
I worked in a second-hand bookshop for years. I found some intriguing things in books: photographs of children (by then twice my age), receipts for hats, old letters. I once discovered a book on Menzies, which included a letter from the old man himself.
I also have a copy of Nietzsche's letters, with marginalia by David Diamond, the American composer. Fascinating to see his exclamation marks and comments. On the cab driver who whipped the horse, before Nietzsche's collapse, David wrote: "I'd have biffed the cab driver in the mouth".
...02 Aug 09 at 13:41
Librarians find good stuff too - photos, shopping lists, letters, poems...a recent favourite was a 'to do' list that began: "TALK TO MUM ABOUT SPOTS!!!"
...02 Aug 09 at 20:55
Was so touched by the hidden letter in Ishiguro. Went through a similar experience, and a former mate penned a note in one of Salman Rushdie's novel. I can picture it nestling with a host of other books at a secondhand bookstore, all waiting to be lifted on the next exhilirating journey..one of new discoveries. If only books could talk!
...04 Aug 09 at 6:50
So glad you enjoying the site - FB
...14 Sep 09 at 23:43
I really like that site too, and as a librarian, I've always loved the things that you find in books, but...I read this post when you first put it up, and I wrote a comment then, but didn't post it, but it's still haunting me...I'm really uncomfortable with that postcard that was in Remains of the Day. 2000 wasn't that long ago. I'd be devastated if I were one of those people (or the person who is wearing that necklace now) and I came across this. And I know the internet is an enormous place, but still, they could (as the blurring of the surname acknowledges).
To me, it just feels far too present to be posted on the internet.
Could be I'm overly sensitive - I cleaned out three houses last year, only one of them mine, and it weighed me down, the responsibility of what to do with this, that and the other. So, happy to concede that I could be wrong about this. But, I just don't know. It really has been haunting me.
(And then, I started thinking (but this is getting a bit off topic) if you buy a second hand phone or second hand computer and it's still got photos or emails or texts on it, would it be all right to post those?)
...17 Sep 09 at 9:48
Tracy - thanks for your comment. You do raise a fair point about privacy and the ethics of what gets uploaded on the internet.
I certainly don't have all the answers, but I would say this - it is a grey area and it is difficult to draw the line. I'm guessing everyone would have a different view as to what year/sentiment is or isn't appropriate. We are living in an increasingly open society and this can be worrying, but FB do try and protect privacy by erasing surnames, addresses etc.
Personally I think the note is beautiful and touching, as was Ishiguro's novel, and I read it in that context - an example of how fiction can speak to us and the many things that we go through.
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