For Margaret, Christmas 1974. All my love, R.
The book was a hardcover of The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence, the Viking edition with the deteriorating jacket, and it came into the shop in a box of otherwise unremarkable fiction — book club editions, a warped Michener, the usual sediment of a house being emptied. The inscription was in blue fountain pen, confident, male-looking, in the way handwriting used to declare itself. Forty-nine years later the book was in my pricing pile, which meant Margaret was gone, or downsizing, or had never much wanted The Rainbow in the first place — and R., whoever R. was, all of whose love this was, had passed entirely into the letter of his own initial.
Eleven years of used books meant eleven years of inscriptions, and I never learned to price one without reading it, and I never read one without the little vertigo. An inscription is a message that has outlived its occasion — a toast still standing in a room the party has left. It was written for two people, exactly two, and now it belongs to whoever pays six dollars. There should be a word for this class of object: the accidentally public. Letters found in attics, postcards in flea-market shoeboxes, the voicemail kept after the caller is gone. Text that has escaped its address.
The genres of inscription are few and deep. The gift romantic, like R.’s, is the most common and the most ruthless to encounter later, because its fate is binary: either the love lasted, in which case the book’s arrival in my pile marks a death, or it didn’t, in which case the inscription curdled on the shelf for years, a small embarrassment with a spine. The gift pedagogical: To David on his graduation — this book changed my life, may it change yours. (David read eleven pages; the receipt was still inside; the change went unadministered.) The gift apologetic, rarer and always fascinating: I know this doesn’t fix anything, but page 214 says what I can’t. I looked up page 214. It was a poem about winter. I have wondered about that apology for years — what it didn’t fix, whether the poem was ever read, whether winter was the problem or the excuse.
And then the self-inscriptions, my favorite genre: the owner’s name and a date, sometimes a city. J. Morrison, Cairo, 1963. No sentiment, no recipient — just a flag planted in the flyleaf, saying I was the reader; it was here and then. These are inscriptions written to the future by people who understood, consciously or not, that books outlive their owners and might as well carry the manifest. When I buy an old book bearing one, I feel less like a customer than a successor. The book has had a captain before. Its log is one line long, but it is a log.
People sometimes asked, at the shop, whether inscriptions lower a book’s value, and the trade answer is yes, generally, a marked book is a damaged book, knock a dollar off. The human answer is that the inscription is frequently the most valuable page in the volume — the only page that exists in one copy. Everything else in that Rainbow, Viking had printed by the thousands. For Margaret had a print run of one. The novel you can replace; the toast you cannot. Somewhere in the transaction between those two answers — the dollar off, the irreplaceable page — is the whole strange economy of secondhand things, which prices the general and cannot see the particular.
What the inscriptions taught me, cumulatively, at the rate of a few a week for a decade, is something about the half-life of intention. Every one was written in a moment of aimed feeling — love aimed at Margaret, hope aimed at David, apology aimed at page 214 — and every aim, without exception, eventually loses its target and keeps flying. The feeling doesn’t die; it goes feral. It ends up in a pricing pile in Providence being read by a stranger who now — this is the part I can’t get over — carries it. I remember Margaret’s Christmas. I wasn’t born yet, I never met her, and it isn’t mine, but memory doesn’t check provenance. R. wrote a message to one woman in 1974 and hit, decades later, a bookseller he couldn’t have imagined, and now you, whoever you are, reading this: the aim goes on failing forward. That may be the real lesson of the flyleaf. Nothing written stays addressed. Sooner or later, all of it is To whom it may concern — and it concerns us more than the writers could have guessed, and differently, and later, and forever.
I bought the Lawrence myself, in the end. It’s on the shelf behind me, jacket taped, dollar knocked off. Every December I take it down and read the flyleaf, which has become, by pure accident of survival, the only place on earth where that particular Christmas still happens. All my love, R. All of it, still. Somebody had to keep it somewhere.