The Friends of Pack Library recently held its semiannual book sale. It was a big success. The money supports library programs that enrich our community. We are tremendously grateful to those who bought books and who donated them. Preparing for the sale, volunteers sort hundreds of books. Most go to stock Bookends, our bookstore on the main floor of the library, open during library hours.
Sorting the books can lead to surprises, such as a little pack of romantic poems paper clipped together. Regrettably the poems had fallen out unnoticed, so the book that had held them is unknown.
It took some sleuthing to discover the poems likely were published in a Midwestern newspaper sometime in the late 1940s. Back then newspapers regularly ran poetry features in what was called the “women’s section.”
In the antiquarian book trade, the bits of paper and historical debris tucked between the pages are known as interstitial ephemera. To the rest of us, they are bookmarks. For as long as we have had books, we have lacked proper bookmarks, opting instead to draft whatever flat object happens to be within arm’s reach into emergency service.
Consequently, to spend any time processing old volumes is to realize that humanity has spent the last few centuries reading while doing everything else. Shake out a box of vintage books and you might find pressed four-leaf clovers that have turned into brown, oil-stained ghosts on the paper, bus and railway stubs from long-defunct commuter lines, unsent postcards and grocery lists requesting things like “lard” and “ammonia.”
Every so often, a book sorter may hit the jackpot—a forgotten paper money acting as a placeholder. Truly bewilderingly, book dealers tell of finding mummified strips of uncooked bacon, slices of cheese and pieces of toast. I kid you not.
For decades, librarians viewed these insertions as a nuisance — acidic vandalism that threatened the longevity of the paper. They were routinely tossed into the trash. Today, a fascinating archival shift is underway. Scholars have realized that while the printed text tells us what an author thought, the ephemera tells us how we actually lived.
This has sparked an academic movement centered on “bibliodiversity.” Projects like Book Traces at the University of Virginia are systematically combing the pre-1923 circulating stacks of academic libraries, not looking for pristine first editions, but for the messy interventions of everyday readers. They are finding nineteenth-century poetry volumes functioning as community diaries, where families recorded the exact hour a loved one passed away right next to a stanza on grief. A less lofty catalog of the debris of our reading lives has been kept in the Forgotten Bookmarks archive run by antiquarian bookseller dedicated to documenting these unintentional pieces of human history.
The next book sale is in October. Meanwhile we’ll be sorting books, looking for the best to offer. If you want to give us a thrill, tuck a buck in a book you donate. It’s tax deductible.
Friends
Friends of Pack Library 