The Secret Life Of Books

   Buying a lot of books to read from thrift shops, garage sales, swap meets, etc., often results in the occasional discovery of an unusual bookmark, an odd citation or two, or a dog-eared page that provokes a little speculation.

   Grocery lists, various utility bills, unused checks, business cards, postcards, pieces of greeting cards, small decals with the backing intact, torn pages from notebooks, corners of envelopes, and even pages torn from books being read have all been found being used as bookmarks. 

   Citations have been encountered that underscore every mention of a specific character in a book, or locations used, or years cited - I remember reading a well-worn copy of Follet's Winter of the World (the second book in the Century trilogy) and discovering a very detailed timeline of the events in the novel written in a very neat though minute print on the inside back cover or the book - the timeline cross-referenced chapters, paragraphs and pages to years of occurrence.  

   As for dog-eared pages, I would estimate that at least 75% of all the used books I've ever read have had them. Why do people dog-ear pages? An easy first guess is that the reader could not find anything to use as a bookmark. However, it's also possible (since dog-earing creates a more hidden placeholder) that the reader creased the corner of the particular page in order to remember something of importance on that particular page as they kept reading - maybe an extremely well-written passage, a great turn of phrase, or a crucial plot element or twist.

   This morning as I was reading a copy of Hemingway's A Movable Feast (A book I bought awhile ago and am just now finishing) I discovered a dog-eared page near the end of the memoir - page 197, the first page of the last chapter wherein he makes mention of his babysitting cat. There is also a date penciled in on page 211. the last page of the book - February 17th, 2008.

  I pondered for a minute or two the possible significance of both the dog-eared page (surely there couldn't be a need to place hold the first page of the last chapter, must be something significant to it), and the penciled in date (was finishing this Hemingway masterwork a victory of some sort?). 

   Then I closed the book and put it back on the shelf, figuring neither really could have been that special as I picked up that copy for a quarter at a garage sale.