By Miriam Intrator, Special Collections Librarian, Mahn Center for Archives & Special Collections
“What is your favorite book in the rare book collection?” This is a question students and other visitors regularly ask me, but it is impossible for me to pick just one! I am, however, able to point to a favorite category: books containing evidence of previous ownership and use. Perhaps you have also experienced the excitement of finding a flower pressed between pages, or a meaningful gift note inscribed on a title page, or an interesting bookplate pasted inside a front cover. Traces such as these can bring an otherwise seemingly unremarkable book to life. They can make a remarkable book that much more fascinating. They help us to imagine and perhaps reconstruct stories about how a book may have been used over time, and by whom.
The exhibit, Meetings In The Margins: Encounters with Readers and Owners in Rare Books, explores select items from the rare book collection to consider the question, what can we learn from what people leave in their books? On view in the 4th floor lobby area of Alden Library through the spring 2023 semester as well as online, the exhibit explores various traces, marks, and materials that readers and owners have left behind in books.
Names: bookplates or signatures:
Marginalia: handwritten notes marking important passages or opinions on the text
Mementos: pressed plants and flowers, small pieces of fabric, receipts, notecards, and so much more, pressed between the pages
In some cases, what we find provides enough information for us to reconstruct the story of the relationship between the book and the person who left something behind. In other cases, as in a scrap of fabric, we are left with more questions than answers.
Did this just serve as a handy bookmark? Or was it cut from something – an item of clothing or a blanket perhaps – that made the scrap an object of meaning in and of itself? In many cases we will never know the full story, but examining and reflecting on what people leave behind in books provides an opportunity for us to think about our own interactions with books and other objects in our lives. How do we leave our mark? What do we want our descendants or future researchers or the curious to know about us?
Your turn! Do you write or leave mementos inside books? Why or why not? Or have you found anything really interesting inside of a book? Please share any thoughts, examples, images, or stories.