Someday someone will start a club called Collector's Anonymous and attendees will have to say, "My name is so-and-so and I'm a book/comics/games/patches/stamps collector.
Why do we do it? The first answer is obvious: we like the subject matter. Maybe you're a fan of card games and card tricks and you collect all different kinds of playing decks because they fascinate you. That's certainly the reason I collected games and still collect books. If you've been reading, you know I'm overcoming some of those psychoses by letting go, selling off the boxes of old crap, and donating the proceeds to charity.
There's a minor secondary entertainment I have gotten from collecting books. Many of the copies I acquire are second-hand and come with surprises. There are the unpleasant ones, like the ones with food stains or that reek of cigar smoke, as those afflictions don't show up in the eBay pictures.
Then there are the pleasant ones that come in the form of personal notes found in the book's pages. Sometimes these are annotations where the former owner noticed an inaccuracy in the text and added a correction, or had personal knowledge of a fact not mentioned in the text and wrote it into the margin, effectively improving the book. And sometimes there are actual letters folded into the book. These might be notes in a book given to a friend or family member that share the owner's thoughts about it.
I've been the unintended recipient of several examples of this curious form of disconnected communication.
The first came when I got a long sought-after copy of Pushing the Envelope, the biography of WWII US Marine pilot Marion Carl, by Carl and the excellent naval aviation historian Barrett Tillman. It was a signed by Carl and sold by one of his friends or a family member. I spent $100 on it and that was probably a fair market value of the book at the time. Since then I think many reprints have improved the book's availability and it's possibly not worth much anymore to most people, but for me that $100 is a bargain. Inside the book were two photocopied sheets. One is Marion Carl's career brief. Carl was a test pilot in addition to a fighter pilot, and the other sheet lists accidents Carl endured as a test pilot. I'm not sure why or how these sheets got into the book. Sometimes at a press event to introduce and promote a book, attendees get a copy and extra materials like these sheets. The former owner of the book may have been an attendee and put these sheets into the book.
Something similar appears to have happened with another book I picked up more recently, by Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer, Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War. I got it at a used bookstore in Houston, and in the front of the book was a pamphlet handed out at a Houston area charity golf event where Meyer was a celebrity guest.
One of the more touching inserts I found came in the book Robert Wood Johnson, The Gentleman Rebel by Lawrence G. Foster. This thick biography about the founder of Johnson & Johnson was given to someone by the book's former owner and inside was a handwritten note from what I interpret as a man to a woman. The note writer formerly worked for Johnson & Johnson. He held respect for Johnson but also criticized him for personality flaws. The note writer also makes interesting observations about the company J & J is today, identifying how different it is from what Johnson started. It's an interesting point, and one pertinent to many corporations. EDS, IBM, and HP, like J&J, were all started by stalwart and headstrong leaders, and all certainly evolved from their origins into something different. There are no sensitive missives in the letter from the Johnson book, nor any romantic overtures. This leads me to deduce the letter is probably from a father to a daughter or brother to sister.
These lost communications are quite intriguing and add texture to the aura of these books. It's such an interesting phenomena that others have written about it.
Here's an article at a website called Atlas Obscura: The Best Things Found Between the Pages of Old Books - Atlas Obscura
There's almost no subject free from commentary on Reddit, and in the books subreddit, sure enough was this old collection of adventures: Does anyone else love finding books with other people's notes in them? : r/books (reddit.com)
Somewhat related is this article at CBC about a librarian that cataloged all the objects she found that readers had used as bookmarks.
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