A collection of objects found inside books at The Monkey's Paw, a Toronto shop specializing in old and unusual books. Objects are removed before the books are shelved.Sarah Palmer/The Globe & Mail
Sandwiched in between pages 12 and 13 of my battered 1965 copy of The William Saroyan Reader – bought for nine American dollars from Manhattan’s Strand bookstore in 1992 – is a child’s drawing of a rose.
It is a proudly rudimentary sketch, a big swirl of red crayon atop a thin, leafy green stalk. But there is detail in the stalk, with the veins of each leaf rendered in bold green lines, and it has been cut out delicately (possibly by a responsible adult) in a way that has given it a blousy innocent power. This power is accentuated by the fact that the crayon wax has bled through into the adjacent pages. The words they have stained are some of the finest ever written by this little-remembered Armenian-American writer, from a 1951 children’s story for adults titled Tracy’s Tiger. It’s about a young couple, Tracy and Laura, in search of love, their aching need represented by the beautiful, sensual tigers that follow them everywhere.
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I look at this flower maybe once a year, certainly more than I read my William Saroyan Reader, and just before Christmas I found myself looking at it again and remembering all the other strange, beautiful or inconsequential things I’ve found in books down the years: bus and theatre tickets; postcards; shopping lists; a series of pressed flowers inside a paperback copy of Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller, Rogue Male, given to me by an old girlfriend. I still have the book, but the pressed flowers are long gone. How could I have lost those flowers?
I started to wonder what other people might have found inside second-hand books and, as a habitual Twitter user with a decent amount of followers, I decided to ask them. The results were more strange, eerie and wonderful than I could have imagined.
First, there was nature, in all its abundance. There was a pressed vine leaf inside an 1806 family Bible purchased by Ian Walker (@fenlandgent). And there were numerous four-leaf clovers, found inside copies of The Virgin Suicides (@emmalyskava), an old Greek copy of Homer’s epic poetry (@goethean), a 1930s French schoolbook (@mickbore) and the 1954 William Faulkner novel, A Fable.
Many of these discoveries were unbearably poignant, such as the one reported by @JOJOCO88, who said she bought the first Eagle Annual at a jumble sale when she was a child only to discover it was her father’s own inscribed childhood copy. Then there was @hzgchld, who in 2016 took out Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came To the End from his local library and inside found a mass card for his own grandmother, who died in 2010.
Sarah Palmer/The Globe & Mail
Others were adventures in time travel, such as the 1960s Edinburgh Corporation Transport bus ticket @waltydunlop found in a Penguin edition of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius. Of a somewhat more jazz-age stripe, @voxpupuluxe found a postcard inside a 1920s guide to the French island commune of Mont-Saint-Michel, which read “Darling, this is the place for us. Champagne three bucks a quart! I love you, Cliff.” Meanwhile, @tracyurq found a beautiful 1913 map of the Toronto streetcar system in a 1932 London tourist guide, bought at one of the University of Toronto’s used-book fairs.
Sarah Palmer/The Globe & Mail
A majority of the submissions were decidedly unsettling. Inside a 1946 book by famed psychic researcher Harry Price on Borley Rectory, the most haunted house in Britain, @bookwormnorth found an original photo of the author excavating the site. Another user, @hellothisisivan, found a beheaded photo of a woman holding a cat inside a 1974 paperback anthology of horror stories about dogs. There is also the 1803 copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost purchased by @dopaminetheft, which bears the chilling inscription, “My name is temptation touch me not.” And there is the shopping list that @SSheil found inside a copy of Gloria Swanson’s autobiography, with one side devoted to such mundane necessities as “mushrooms… Spanish onions” and a more terrible inventory on the reverse: “Stripper, blood, upright bird.”
My favourites were the ones that immediately hinted at bigger stories, such as the love letters Nathan W. Armes (@nathanwarmes) found inside a used map to the Colorado backroads, or the business card for a private detective called Victor R. A. Martin that @Marc_Gascoigne discovered in a copy of Eric Gill’s 1931 monograph, An Essay On Typography.
Sarah Palmer/The Globe & Mail
Yet, perhaps that’s what all these items do – hint at bigger stories – and that’s why we hold on to them. They’re tangible fragments of the past that allow us to touch the vanished lives of the readers who came before us. We take these items and we ask, “Who, how, why and what if?”
These seemingly inconsequential artifacts are anything but. They transport us to other worlds, in much the same manner as the books they have hidden inside for all these years.
Of course, we regularly find other, less romantic items left inside our old books, such as snot, dried blood, orange pith and, as two different librarians informed me, rashers of bacon. But these don’t incite stories in us in quite the same way as the postcards, the pressed flowers, the maps and the bus tickets listed above.
I have certainly conferred a story upon my pressed flower. I should have told you this at the start. It’s something to do with a father in a grand Manhattan apartment in 1965, reading Tracy’s Tiger to his eight-year-old daughter, and using her flower drawing as his bookmark. Maybe he stopped reading on page 12 when he realized the story was too grown-up for an eight-year-old. Maybe the book was packed away in a house move or a divorce and never read again until I picked it up. I wonder where that young girl is now? I wonder if she ever existed? I wonder if she’s reading this now?
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