Objects you find in library books: A brief guide
A bookmark: This book was not merely abandoned, it was forgotten until the due date rolled around. The borrower returns it hurriedly and is secretly glad to be rid of it. By reading beyond the previous borrower’s bookmark, I have beaten them, and my prize is a lovely new bookmark. It will help to replace the ones of mine that keep mysteriously disappearing. Come to mention it, this one looks rather familiar.
An underline (pencil): Everybody knows that you don’t write in library books. Whoever marked this book was so overwhelmed by what they were reading, its beauty or its power or its truth, that they forgot themselves. They drew this faint little line knowing that they had only the space of a three-week loan to refer to it. Perhaps they came back and copied the passage out into a little commonplace book. See how neat and straight and gentle it is: they were trying not to hurt. See the little tremble at the end as they grew nervous. There is the slightest hint of rubbing out at the beginning, abandoned for fear of taking the ink along with the graphite. The book is more beautiful for this act of love. It should be reproduced in all future editions.
An underline (pen): Society is in a terminal decline. I am going to become one of those weird conservatives who converts to Catholicism and then picks fights with the Pope online. I am going to find a way to blame this on the public funding of libraries. Mass literacy was a mistake.
A torn-off flap from a lift-the-flap book: Some poor parent, one of my distant colleagues in sleep deprivation, took their eyes off Postman Bear for a microsecond to deal with a life-threatening emergency and this happened. Their child-addled brain flooded with anxiety that did not abate until they returned it to the library unnoticed. Now the vulture of their worry is circling me instead: when we take this book back they will think my child did this. But I can be a hero instead. The boy and I gather tape and glue and felt-tips to make our repair. But the flap, which depicts the lid of a wicker basket, has nowhere to go. It is from a completely different book. My son is crying, insistent that we stick it somewhere.
An important-looking piece of paper: Maybe with a phone number or a love note on it. Maybe it is a receipt for a very large sum, or an unchecked lottery ticket. Maybe it contains medical details, or a username and password. Most of these must be unwise bookmarks; some were surely tucked between the pages for safekeeping. They might have sat on the shelf for months. You probably ought to destroy them unread, but there is a strange pleasure in marking your page with someone else’s secrets.