The Secret Life of Second-hand Books

I was halfway through reading a novel published in 1913: cloth- covered, rust-spotted and printed on slightly spongy thick cream paper. Mightier than the Sword, a semi-autobiographical newspaper thriller, was written by a young Fleet Street journalist called Alphonse Courlander, who would die three years later in the muddy trenches of France. It isn’t great literature and I was struggling to stay engaged when, between pp.192 and 193, I found a folded piece of blue paper: a letter dated 1964, sent from a guest house in Ryde on the Isle of Wight.

Its writer, Annie, seemed to be in some distress about a missed meeting with the addressee, Charlie, who had evidently let her down before. The letter was at a point in the novel where the dashing inky-fingered protagonist is gently breaking off a love affair with a woman whose lowly social status no longer matches his ambitions, and in that moment of reading letter and novel, the real and the fictional became intertwined. I began to wonder about Annie and Charlie and whether they had a ‘happy ever after’ or whether Annie suffered the fate of many a young single mother then and had to give up her baby. The adventures of a newspaper reporter in pre-First World War Fleet Street were forgotten. I couldn’t get Annie and Charlie out of my head, their story frozen in time for six decades between those musty pages. It made me wonder how many second-hand books are not just simple printed texts but mini-archives of the past. And as a historian, I naturally went first to a printed source to find out. The author and self-confessed second-hand book obsessive Nicholas Royle has referred to discovering ‘inclusions’ as he calls them, in his memoir White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector (2021), which traces his attempts to track down old Picador books from the 1970s to the 1990s. His discoveries are treated matter-of-factly, almost as a curator might label an exhibit in a glass case:

when I flick through The Llama Party, I find it has an inclusion, at page 105: a ‘colourings’ card from the Body Shop with lip stick shades on one side and eyeshadow shades on the other. It holds the same irresistible appeal for me as a paint chart, or a collection of definitive postage stamps. Things that are the same but different. The previous owner of The Llama Party has circled various shades on both sides and ticked certain other colours, while having also written the name ‘Beth’ beside lip stick shades 21 Oyster Pink and 30 Melon.

All very well, but I was looking for something more romantic, and I found it online. The singer-songwriters Yvonne Lyon and Boo Hewerdine have released an album this year called Things Found in Books, inspired by the permanent display of artefacts discovered in books by volunteers at Culzean Castle’s second-hand bookshop in Ayrshire. The musicians were haunted by these snippets of past lives: old photographs, newspaper clippings, tickets and maps that had fallen out of books that had been donated – teasing glimpses of other lives. So, to fill in the gaps, they have created songs about several of the exhibits, making up stories from the clues. The musicians’ powerful response chimed with my own experience. We couldn’t be the only ones. It wouldn’t hurt, I thought, to put out a post one evening on a social media site. I only have a few hundred followers and thought I might be lucky to receive even just one or two replies, but the next morning I found my notifications had gone mad: more than a thousand likes, reposts and replies were waiting for me. I was moved by what I found. Readers had discovered a huge variety of insertions, from Victorian hand-stitched bookmarks to love letters, pressed flowers and endless newspaper cuttings, and it was clear that they had become passionately attached to these discoveries. Several people reported finding multiple newspaper cuttings about an author in the same book, collected and inserted in different decades by different owners: a review of the book, an interview with the author, and finally an obituary. Some had begun to collect these memorabilia, so preserving connections made across the years, between readers who never knew each other but who left items for the next reader to find. Many respondents to my post said they’d only bought a particular book because of what they’d found inside it. Some had taken things further. One correspondent, finding a calendar bookmark dated simply 12 June inside an illustrated edition of The Vicar of Wakefield (1894), became obsessed by discovering the precise year in which the previous owner had read the book. The bookmark recorded the moon and sun rising times that day. Using a historic moon phases database, she traced the year to 1901. ‘It’s nice feeling a connection with someone across the decades,’ she explained. ‘It feels a bit like communing with a ghost.’ Like so many others, she has kept the insertion within the book, at the exact page where she found it. An Australian lawyer became fascinated by the first recipient of a leather-bound copy of Browning’s poetry, awarded, the bookplate records, to ‘Muriel Rutherford for obtaining the highest marks in the 1897 Easter examinations at Kambala School, Sydney’. After weeks of research in the Sydney University archives, she discovered that Muriel was the first woman in Australia to be awarded two degrees, one in 1902 in Arts, and a second, in 1908, in Medicine; she went on to practise as a doctor around the world but died in 1916, leaving a young daughter, Jean. Later, Jean had added her own name to the book plate. ‘I love the book,’ said my correspondent, ‘but I love the story more.’ Another correspondent, a Californian photographer, bought Willa Cather’s novel One of Ours (1922) as a present for his wife, but started reading it first. A few pages in, he found the first of eleven perfectly preserved four-leaf clovers still attached to their fragile stems:

It’s impossible to know the story of who first owned the book. I can’t know their name, where and when they lived, even if they picked and preserved the clovers themselves or if it was someone else, maybe their child or grandchild. I’d love to hear how long it took them to find so many four-leaf clovers, why they chose that particular book to press the leaves, and how the book came to be forgotten or sold or given away. Of course, that’s all lost. However, some person found and saved those little good-luck talismans, and I re-found them, and that made me a participant in the story.

Judging by the experience of Robert Sansom, who runs the Petersfield Bookshop in Hampshire, there is a wealth of material, living, forgotten and not-so-forgotten, within the pages of books. Sansom, who receives thousands of second-hand books each month, has discovered banknotes (mostly no longer in circulation), hand stitched bookmarks, confidential documents (which he shreds), bus tickets from around the world, and the obituaries of authors. ‘With each insert I find, I have to decide, do I keep it in the book, do I try to trace the owner, to return it, or do I destroy it because the material is confidential and the owner could be identified. It’s quite a mine field.’ Just what is it that inspires someone to place an object within the pages of a book? Kate Macdonald, an independent publisher, explains what prompted her. She has a much-loved copy of T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1974), a twelfth birthday present from her uncle and aunt. In 1981, aged 17, Kate went to see Cats, the musical, and she stuck her ticket inside the book as a reminder of a memorable experience, her first visit to London by overnight bus from her home in Aberdeen. One day, she says, when the time comes for her shelves to be emptied and their contents sent to second-hand bookshops, the ticket, still stuck there with yellowing tape, will be found by its next owner, who will no doubt be fascinated by the connection.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Sarah Lonsdale 2025