The things people leave in books

and the things I wish people would leave in there, instead

Provenance. It’s one of those words I can’t hear, or say out loud, without imagining a bespectacled, silk bowtie-wearing art dealer also saying it. Intoning it, even, over a lectern, to a sea of respectfully nodding heads.

Provenance sounds impressively fancy to me, mostly because of its association with the world of priceless art and antiques, which is not a world I live in. I am not fluent in the language spoken there. But I love the sound of it, and sometimes I pick up the odd word and bring it home, find a use for it in my everyday life.

Despite how it sounds (all those lovely, mellifluous vowels!) provenance is not some abstract or esoteric concept —it’s simply a record of ownership, the specific sets of hands or locations through which an object has passed. It’s important information, used to authenticate and repatriate valuable works of art, but also, to gain insight into the particular lives these art works touched, the various eras they have endured, the attics and gallery walls they have known.

In the world of rare, antiquarian, and valuable books—another world I do not live in, but would happily slip into, given the chance—provenance is studied for the same reasons, for historical interest and assessment of value. Things like signatures, inscriptions, marginalia, are pored over and discussed endlessly, especially if they were made by a famous person or historical figure.

But in the world of secondhand bookshops, indications of provenance only detract from the value. We actively seek anonymous books—the fewer traces of their previous owners, the better. We reject annotated books because our shoppers do not want the scribblings of a contemporary, non-famous human in their books. Such marks are not evidence of the book’s unique custodial history—they are simply distracting, irritating reminders that this book once belonged to someone else. And even though I fully understand this reasoning, and I appreciate pristine secondhand books just as much as the next reader, I feel obscurely offended by it, on behalf of both the books and their erstwhile owners.

Even the most humble, mass-produced objects have a provenance. Every book that comes in our door has one. And it is interesting, to me anyway, even if it negatively impacts its resale value, and it is my job to erase as much of it as I can before putting the book on the shelf.

When I peel off a big, round, purple price-tag, I think about how the book once suffered the indignity of placement on the Indigo bargain books table, and I wonder about the buyer who rescued it. Before I wipe off the cover and affix our price tags, I flip through it and then shake it gently, upside down, always hoping that something like a grocery list or receipt or a postcard will fall out and yes, of course I would read any old slip of paper I found and ponder what little clue it offers about the person who stuck in it there. Wouldn’t you?

I was shocked to find out that G. does not do this. She is either less curious about people, or more respectful of their private lives than I am. Perhaps both. When I ask her about what sorts of things she finds in books, she says well, we get a lot of memorial notices.

While I’ve never used a memorial notice for this purpose myself, I do understand the impulse. They’re so often just the right size for a bookmark, and I don’t have a scrapbooking bone in my body. The few such notices I have I have, are in my desk drawer, because I didn’t feel right about just tossing them in the recycle box. It felt disrespectful, even to someone I didn’t know well, to just pitch a testament to their loving memory in on top of my empty cereal boxes.

A pressed flower would be a lovely thing to find in a book, but I never have. A winning lottery ticket would be nice too. Photo by Daniela on Unsplash

Of course, we also find a lot of actual bookmarks in the books we accept. Those she keeps in a drawer behind the till, because one can never have too many, and sometimes people ask.

And—get this—she sometimes finds Kleenex. Perfectly flat, presumably unused Kleenex but still, I was repulsed. Ugh, I said. Why doesn’t anyone use five dollar bills as bookmarks? G laughed. Once I found a Q-Tip, she said.

As grossed out as I was, part of me really, really wanted to know what book she found it in. But she couldn’t remember.

And I also wondered if she accepted that book, whatever it was, on the odds that the cotton swab was fresh out of the box. But I waited a beat too long to ask, and the moment passed. I couldn’t very well bring it up again later. For the rest of that shift, I felt a little like Jerry in that episode of Seinfeld, you know, the one where he accidentally knocks his girlfriend’s toothbrush into the toilet, and she somehow uses it before he gets a chance to tell her what happened, and then she puts something of his in the toilet, but won’t tell him what, and it drives him crazy, the wondering.

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People study the personal libraries of famous writers, looking for insight into their lives and minds, and to do terrifically erudite things, like trace the influence of one writer’s work on another writer’s work. The books themselves are not only housed, preserved, and studied in universities but also catalogued and presented online, for the benefit of readers without access to the physical copies, through a massive project called Legacy Library.

You can search through many famous authors’ libraries to see not only a list of their books, but an image and yes, a note indicating various “provenance marks,” such as inscriptions and bookplates. The presence of marginalia is also noted. The presence of things like coffee stains, or crinkling edges caused by reading in the bathtub, are not—at least not in the entries I casually browsed through, from Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s collection of over 5000 books.

I suppose I would have to examine the physical books myself to discover these details, should they exist, which I would dearly love to do—especially in light of this information, via the scholar Jane de Gay:

"The Woolf's library is therefore extremely useful as a source of evidence on how they read and used books: volumes carry signs of usage or partial usage, signs that become more clearly intelligible when read in conjunction with their published writings and personal documents such as diaries and reading notebooks. […] Clearly the Woolfs loved books, hoarded them, gave and received them as presents. They bought new issues, but they clearly also used second-hand shops, often finding antiquarian pieces, lavishly bound and illustrated, and that was part of the appeal.”

The italics are mine, of course. I added them after I recovered from my swoon.

Most of the time, you just don’t know, when you a buy a secondhand book, exactly where it has been or to whom it has belonged, or what it once meant to them. You also don’t know, when you sell or donate a book to a secondhand shop, where it will end up. It could well pass through the hands of the most brilliant writer of your generation.

Even if you leave a Q-tip in it.