Ghosts Between the Pages

Books Preserve Our Lives With More Than Just Words

Edit note: Before we begin, first, hello to all the fans of the band The Warning that joined us here at Day By Day after last week’s post! I’m so happy you’re here! Little Bean and I are going to see the band for the first time next month and we’re so excited, and yes, we WILL be writing at length about our experience so stick with us and pass the word! (FYI, the kid heard the song “23” for the first time the other day and now that’s her favorite.)

Second, I’m a day behind today. Normally, I’d post every Tuesday morning, but, well, life and all that. I appreciate your patience! Let’s go!

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Sometime around Thanksgiving, sometime around 1903, Helen Hayward Williams found herself in an old cemetery and someone snapped this picture.

On the back of the picture is written “In an old cemetery / Taken Thanksgiving time / Helen Hayward Williams.”

Stuff like this haunts me.

There is a curious part of the job of being a library director that flies somewhat under the radar. Donations. We get a lot of them. In fact, my library collects donations for its big yearly book sale all year long. What that effectively means is that donations are flooding into the library nearly Every. Single. Day.

Donations come in many shapes and sizes. Maybe someone is downsizing. Or they want to make a philanthropic donation. Or their kids are grown up. Or they are interested in a subject and they want to make sure the library has books on that subject on their shelves. Pretty standard.

But every so often, something more unusual happens. Someone knows someone who is cleaning out an old attic, or cellar.

Or in today’s example, a family that had lived at their old farm for several generations is cleaning out the barn, and lo and behold, an entire loft packed with old books.

I got that call last fall. We found all these books. Lots of them. We know nothing about them. Can you help us? So over I went.

In general, we’ve found that much to their credit, people are generally unwilling to throw out books. And so they call us. Or better yet, just show up at the library with a trunk or flatbed packed with boxes of books, and sometimes puzzles, CDs, DVDs and toys as well. We will, in general take it all off their hands with the exception of a few things like magazines, encyclopedias and Reader’s Digest.

And VHS. Goodness, but people still have those!

Anyway, this collection was enormous, perhaps 1,500 items. And old. Some items dated back to the 1840s. Most were from around 1900. About three quarters of it was too far gone to be salvaged - moldy, bug eaten, falling apart.

But the rest! Well! You’ll see it if you stop by our book sale this week at Auburn Village School on Saturday and Sunday. I’ll have a special table for these older, more interesting items. Info on the book sale here.

To me, though, one of the more interesting parts of sorting old books is the memories they hold. Sometimes literally. Pressed four leaf clovers. Notes in the margin. Letters. Advertisements used as book marks.

And my favorite: pictures, including the one above of the aforementioned Helen. Part of my job, indeed perhaps my responsibility, is to leaf through every book - just give it a quick flick through - to find the treasures within.

Helen’s picture was found in the follow book: “A Practical German Grammar” by William Eysenbach. (Ginn & Company Publishers, Boston, 1903) A textbook. Was Helen learning German? Maybe it was a friend or family book, someone who wanted Helen close and used her picture as a bookmark as a memory.

Speaking of 1903, what about Mr. Herbert Del Ranney, who in June of that year purchased a set of lessons on Mechanical Drawing from the International Correspondence Schools (ISC) out of Scranton, PA. Herbert hailed from Laconia.

Herbert’s certificate was found the the book “Confessions of a War Correspondent” by William Shepherd (Harper, New York 1917).

The ISC is still around by the way, now based in the UK. At the time, according to archival reports, in 1900, one in 27 Americans had taken a correspondence course with ISC. Herbert was in good company.

I found Herbert, by the way. He worked as an accountant for the state hospital out of Concord for most of his life, passing away in 1960 in Candia (where the books came from) at the age of 75. That would have made Herbert 18 when he applied for that mechanical drawing class. I hope he was able to use it.

And one more, perhaps my favorite. Here is a delicate pen and ink, drawn on lined notebook paper and folded four times, of a bird perching on a feather. In the lower right hand side, the artist has inscribed the drawing “For Maud.”

Did the artist ever get the drawing to Maud? Or was Maud the owner of the book and kept the drawing there as a keepsake. The book the bird was found in is a masterwork: Virgil’s “Aeneid” from 1862 and published in Latin. By any measure, then or today, the book is precious. I like to think it was Maud herself that kept those birds, and perhaps learned Latin through the adventurous travels of Aeneas, all the while keeping that drawing close to her.

Now, that drawing will be given to Little Bean. Perhaps like Maud before her, it will be found pressed into the pages of another book, in another attic, in another small town and the cycle will begin again.

As for Helen and Herbert and Maud… well, their spirit remains ever preserved in textbooks and memoirs and poetry, reminders of who we once were, what we held dear and the words that once and will always have transcendance.

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Housekeeping: As always, thanks for coming for the ride. If you’re new here, you can find more about me and my books here: Dan’s Bookstore.

You can help keep my caffeinated here: Buy Dan a Coffee.

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