Inscrutably Inscribed

Used books – purchased in bookstores in Boston, New Orleans, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Portsmouth (NH), and other towns during my travels for work, and purchased from second hand book dealers around the world – provided the initial foundation of my research.

The world of used books can be interesting, surprising, charming and occasionally startling. As with the life of Forest Gump and those boxes of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get. One of the joys of working with used books is when you open the cover and find an unexpected inscription.

For example, this note, dated December 25, 1969, was written inside the front cover of a used book that I purchased for $8.00 in Lambertville, NJ:

To My Beloved Husband
On our Third Christmas
Together
Love,
Your Nan

I do not know Nan, but I was instantly touched to learn of this still-burning affection for her beloved husband after three Christmases together.

What moved me even more was the gift that she inscribed in blue ink in her neat, precise handwriting: the diary of a Soviet Union Ambassador from the early days of World War II. What could possibly be more romantic for a couple’s third Christmas together?

Memoirs of a Soviet Ambassador, The War: 1939-43 imparts the experiences and perspective of Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky, the Soviet Union’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom during the buildup and initial years of World War II. Maisky was fluent in English, sociable, cunning, and well-connected. He was on good terms with Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Lord Beaverbrook, and most other British luminaries, and his diaries provide unique perspective on the events and the people driving the events at that critical time.

OK, so Nan’s husband and I might be the only two people in the world who would have been charmed to receive the Maisky diaries as a Christmas or anniversary gift. I hope he was charmed.

Sometimes you turn a page and find an inscription that just perfectly fits the book as well as the writer and the recipient. This simple note, jotted inside DeGaulle, The Rebel 1890-1944, by Jean Lacouture, was doubly warming. Perhaps because it accompanied the biography of an especially dour man, this very brief note made me smile when I first read it, and I smiled again as I typed this:

December 25, 1990
Daddy,
Joyeaux Noel!
Love,
Susan

My favorite inscription was written inside a book I purchased for $2.00 at the Lancaster Library’s annual used book sale.

George Seldes was a journalist and foreign correspondent. I had never heard of him before I saw his memoir Witness to a Century: Encounters With the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs on the long table of used history books at the library sale. Given the title and the timespan that his book covered, I thought it might include a few interesting and useful anecdotes, and I bought it without even skimming its pages. I was wrong. As it turned out, there was not a single story in Witness … that contributed to the book I am writing. But that was perfectly alright. The payoff to my $2.00 investment was the inscription penned on the first page, and it was priceless.

Honey
The title of this
book makes me wish
that we could spend the next
century together, without Arthur, of course.
I Love You,
Joe

Poor Arthur.

Thanks for reading,