I primarily read theology, and lots of early-to-mid-20th century Anglican theology. So, many of the books I read are out of print—and thus only available used. I’ve found that reading in a niche area tends to put some interesting copies in my lap. I have quite a few copies around that previously belonged to “famous” (at least within my little world) theologians. Many of these other copies are often ex-library, often from seminary or monastic libraries. It’s always interesting to see what libraries are getting rid of and to think about the monks or nuns who sat around reading them. (Or not, as the case may be—they were withdrawn, after all.)
My favorite is a copy of Martin Thornton’s The Function of Theology, which had been deaccessioned from the library of the Seminary of the Southwest at some point. I happened to flip to the back to glance at the loan card. It had been borrowed precisely one time—October 23, 1987—but it had been borrowed that one time by a priest who became a friend of mine in 2021 during a course at a different institution. The small world of Anglican theology! I texted him a picture of the book, and he still remembered checking it out.
I used to hang out at used bookstores regularly. Mostly to find cheap but good quality books for my kids when they were younger. I once managed to get a used copy of Paul Graham's On Lisp which was discarded from the technical library of a company somewhere.
The main point of interest is that physical items age and retain artifacts of their lives. I found a childrens book that was discarded from an American library where a girl had scrawled in pencil that she was proud that she finished it. I've seen one which was awarded to a man for being top of his class in college in the early 1900s. The bookshop I used to visit once had a book sold to him which contained a letter from Rabindrnath Tagore in the original in between the leaves of the book.
I recently read a sci-fi book from the library. A previous borrower had jotted notes/corrections/criticisms of the author's science in the margins, in the tiniest, neatest handwriting I've ever seen. None of the "problems" they pointed out detracted from the story, but I guess they really wanted to show off their personal theories of FTL travel to whoever borrowed the book next. It was hilarious, and I'll remember the book forever because of that.
I opened a bookshop after a long run in tech to try to slow down, and one of the pleasant surprises was the joy in accepting used book donations. I re-donate most of them, but have found some wonderful bookmarks and inscriptions in many. The words matter most, of course, but the tangible evidence of people decades or centuries ago is something that speaks to me profoundly. One inscription in a tiny book of prayers mentioned a friend passing it on after it had been placed under her deceased infant sister's chin, which was both morbid and moving. Autographs of spooks like J. Edgar Hoover conjure up other feelings. One other comment: the very old books will probably be around for a few centuries more after the newer ones have turned to dust.
> One other comment: the very old books will probably be around for a few centuries more after the newer ones have turned to dust.
Future historians will curse the 19th and 20th centuries for switching to acidic paper. Thankfully more and more books are printed on acid free paper via ISO 9706.
what are you using for ecommerce? i need feedback on my app for booksellers if you're interested in trying it out: https://www.bookhead.net/. i'm also working on a squarespace plugin to sync a store's inventory from basil onto their website.
If you are going to collect books as physical objects, rather than their much more convenient digital versions, then it strikes me you should actually find the signs of previous interactions with that object (library stamps, marks from other readers etc) make them more interesting than pristine copies that no one has read.
Personally I do like these marks. But I buy books to read, not as an investment. I recently bought a book on "How to survive being gassed" published in 1934. It had a typed A4 sheet of paper in it with a poem about how to identify the different types of gas. Humourous and probably useless but real and very alive.
I also take umberidge with the idea that digital books are more convenient. A physical book is more engaging, more beautiful, more real and more present than a digital book. All things that I find convenient when I want to interact with knowledge and art. Horses for courses I assume.
You bring up a good point about physical vs digital.
I'm still not sure if my children for example, understands that when I'm staring at an iPad I'm almost always reading a book. Does a vast library in iBooks translate to them as well as the same library on physical books in a bookshelf in the house? My sense is it does not.
And when I'm gone, will anyone find any interest in my iBook library? In its highlights and notes? In the books I've read and re-read dozens of times?
Some of my fondest memories are going over my older or deceased family members' book shelves. I have never, however, gone over anyone's tablet. Part of that is because it's newer, but something about the browse-ability of an e-book misses the mark. I can't see which book is worn from being read and re-read, or brimming with notes and scribbles. In digital, it's hard to tell which books that person found significant, but in physical it's obvious by the condition (or even number of copies) of the book.
That runs very much counter to how collectors actually collect books currently. The more pristine the book, the better, aside from particularly rare or valuable inscriptions.
My university regularly put discarded books in a cart in front of the library with a money box, so you could just take a book and put one or two euros in the box. Among other things I got a copy of Benoit Mandelbrots "The fractal geometry of nature" which I still treasure to this day.
That's one of my treasures, too. I paid full price for a hardcover. Many of our books come from second hand dealers, often nature/history/tooling/photography foci. I'm a sucker for thematic histories, large format photography books, and well researched non fiction in general. If you like the marks on books, try postcards! I have ~20,000 of them. Not really sure why, but they're very interesting to scroll through. A card is like a little clue in to a time and place you would never otherwise think of ... logistics networks, handwriting, language, printing technology, inks, subjects of interest, urban development, architecture, fashion: sometimes with messages to boot!
My late mother was an avid reader of library books. She used to mark the books she had read by filling in the loops of the letters on the copyright page. Apparently she noticed the hidden codes that other readers used to similarly mark books they had read: a circle around page 10, a line on page 20, &c.
I wonder if the author has come across such marks?
My late father would put a little star on the last page of the book. He eventually discovered another patron was marking books in a similar fashion and that they had the same taste in books. Whenever he found the other mark he would check out that book.
I always liked the hardback editions of children’s books in UK libraries in the 70s and 80s , and have sought them out secondhand since. Favourites were the US Danny Dunn science story series - almost all of which were amazingly available in the UK, Dr Who hardback editions of the famous Target novelisations - pre-vcr the only way to access old stories (even in the Uk these were very rarely repeated). Hugh Walters 1960s/1970s sf books (passage to Pluto, journey to Jupiter, expedition Venus etc.)
Also the Agaton Sax comedy detective stories, and the largely unknown Uncle the elephant books by JP Martin.
Never heard of Alibris, any other good used book sites? I have bought a book from Abebooks: "Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach", by Objective-C creator Brad Cox.
There is a charity bookshop in my city that exclusively sells ex-library books from the city's libraries. It's very tempting to buy the books there due to them usually being in very good condition.
One of my favorites that I return to regularly and am continually fascinated by is an ex-library book, Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century. It's an "enthno-archealogical" study of about 30 families in early 2000s California.
I love the ambiance of libraries and used book stores so I tend to buy books with a little wear and tear and appreciate their uniqueness.
At the same time I'm loathe to make my own marks in books. I hadn't thought about that contradiction before.
I try to only mark if I think it'll be useful to me, or to someone in the future. I'll lightly mark the location of favorite passages in the margins (that's useful to me, at least, and minimally intrusive), record some information about some obscure reference to a location by an antiquated name that I was only able to track down in some decades-old humanities paper, mark up the TOC with information I wish it had, that kind of thing.
I don't mind most marks from previous readers. Usually I'd rather have them than not, as they're at least interesting in one way or another.
The category of used book with annotations that I don't ever like to buy is one where a previous owner highlighted or underlined seemingly half the book. There's a kind of reader out there who must highlight or underline their books the same way I compulsively select text as I read on a screen, and it wrecks the book.
Can I just drop a word of love and appreciation for Abe Books? I don't buy physical books a lot, but when I do, Abe is definitely the first place I look. The books drop ship from the actual seller, and it's remarkable that I've never had a problematic delivery, after a dozen or so.
My favorite book I've gotten from them was A Psalm for the Wild-Built, which was previously a library book, funny enough.
About finding fascinating hand scribbled notes from books of the past ...
I discovered this in a scanned collection of old books maintained by our government ministry of culture ...
there are comments on some pages (see pages 8, 11, 17 for example) including the cover. in some places the scribbler who seems be an authority on the subject himself expresses some rebuttals/commentary on the text's shortcomings
PS: this was the first time I stumbled across, and discovered that "Gentoo" was another name used by the British for the "Telugu" language of Southern India. I am a native speaker of Telugu and I never knew this fact.
My beautifully bound 1898 score of Mendelssohn's 'Songs without Words' picked up for a song (sorry!) in a junk shop, has the inscription "To Ethyl with love from Mother and Dad Aug. 16th 1911". A treasured item in my library with additional resonance.
I have a fun copy of Mechanized Information Storage, Retrieval And Dissemination (1968) formerly from The Free Library of Philadelphia, covered in "identification required" labels for some reason. There's also a Cinema Props stamp inside the cover, so it may have been set dressing in between the library and the used book store where I got it. https://www.librarything.com/work/17927078/book/215905873
Just a few weeks ago I got an absolutely delightful email:
> Ні! This might seem a little out of the blue and it is but a few years ago at a library book sale I got the book "Pi in the Sky". It has your personal library stamp on it, so I guess YOU got it at a library sale and then re-donated it? I had never read anything about math before that was at all interesting and it got me reading lots of other "popular" math books and I got really interested in number theory. I am now a freshman at CMU and planning to be a math major!
> Sadly, ex-library books have a poor reputation because an old library book can have many miles on the clock
Depends on the clientele. I love finding ex-Bohemian-Club-library books, for example, because they are absurdly well cared for. My most recent one of these was a copy of “San Francisco's Ocean Trade Pᴀsᴛ ᴀɴᴅ Fᴜᴛᴜʀᴇ — A Story of the Deep Water Service of San Francisco, 1848 to 1911.” (1911) because I was very familiar with the coming of the railroads but not so familiar with anything earlier than that: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/San_Fran...
Loved the bit about one of the early steamships used to carry freight up and down the Sacramento River getting outclassed by an ox team — moo moo moo https://i.imgur.com/GVCVY0r.jpeg
I have a few ex-library books. Ex-library to 'ex libris', if you will! I bought them at used book stores and can't fight the sneaking suspicion that I am in possession of stolen property!
I love heavily marked up used books. They make me feel a kinship with another person. Me and "Dan" from 1956 have physically held the same copy of Terman's Electronic and Radio Engineering!
Two very important books for me were both bought in the same library clearance sale when I was around 6/7!
1. A biology text book which is how I learned about sex!
2. Children's Britannica World of Science & Mystery "FUTURE CITIES" which inspired my love for the future and technology, and still has pride of place on my bookshelf. I even wrote a lil thread on Twitter about it [0]
I have a copy of "New Rules for the New Economy" by Kevin Kelly, signed as part of the Global Business Network that he and Steward Brand founded a long time ago.
Having read Fred Turner's immensely great book "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", that is a valuable little piece of history to me.
I primarily read theology, and lots of early-to-mid-20th century Anglican theology. So, many of the books I read are out of print—and thus only available used. I’ve found that reading in a niche area tends to put some interesting copies in my lap. I have quite a few copies around that previously belonged to “famous” (at least within my little world) theologians. Many of these other copies are often ex-library, often from seminary or monastic libraries. It’s always interesting to see what libraries are getting rid of and to think about the monks or nuns who sat around reading them. (Or not, as the case may be—they were withdrawn, after all.)
My favorite is a copy of Martin Thornton’s The Function of Theology, which had been deaccessioned from the library of the Seminary of the Southwest at some point. I happened to flip to the back to glance at the loan card. It had been borrowed precisely one time—October 23, 1987—but it had been borrowed that one time by a priest who became a friend of mine in 2021 during a course at a different institution. The small world of Anglican theology! I texted him a picture of the book, and he still remembered checking it out.
I used to hang out at used bookstores regularly. Mostly to find cheap but good quality books for my kids when they were younger. I once managed to get a used copy of Paul Graham's On Lisp which was discarded from the technical library of a company somewhere.
The main point of interest is that physical items age and retain artifacts of their lives. I found a childrens book that was discarded from an American library where a girl had scrawled in pencil that she was proud that she finished it. I've seen one which was awarded to a man for being top of his class in college in the early 1900s. The bookshop I used to visit once had a book sold to him which contained a letter from Rabindrnath Tagore in the original in between the leaves of the book.
It's a fascinating feeling and quite primal.
I recently read a sci-fi book from the library. A previous borrower had jotted notes/corrections/criticisms of the author's science in the margins, in the tiniest, neatest handwriting I've ever seen. None of the "problems" they pointed out detracted from the story, but I guess they really wanted to show off their personal theories of FTL travel to whoever borrowed the book next. It was hilarious, and I'll remember the book forever because of that.
I opened a bookshop after a long run in tech to try to slow down, and one of the pleasant surprises was the joy in accepting used book donations. I re-donate most of them, but have found some wonderful bookmarks and inscriptions in many. The words matter most, of course, but the tangible evidence of people decades or centuries ago is something that speaks to me profoundly. One inscription in a tiny book of prayers mentioned a friend passing it on after it had been placed under her deceased infant sister's chin, which was both morbid and moving. Autographs of spooks like J. Edgar Hoover conjure up other feelings. One other comment: the very old books will probably be around for a few centuries more after the newer ones have turned to dust.
> One other comment: the very old books will probably be around for a few centuries more after the newer ones have turned to dust.
Future historians will curse the 19th and 20th centuries for switching to acidic paper. Thankfully more and more books are printed on acid free paper via ISO 9706.
what are you using for ecommerce? i need feedback on my app for booksellers if you're interested in trying it out: https://www.bookhead.net/. i'm also working on a squarespace plugin to sync a store's inventory from basil onto their website.
If you are going to collect books as physical objects, rather than their much more convenient digital versions, then it strikes me you should actually find the signs of previous interactions with that object (library stamps, marks from other readers etc) make them more interesting than pristine copies that no one has read.
Personally I do like these marks. But I buy books to read, not as an investment. I recently bought a book on "How to survive being gassed" published in 1934. It had a typed A4 sheet of paper in it with a poem about how to identify the different types of gas. Humourous and probably useless but real and very alive.
I also take umberidge with the idea that digital books are more convenient. A physical book is more engaging, more beautiful, more real and more present than a digital book. All things that I find convenient when I want to interact with knowledge and art. Horses for courses I assume.
You bring up a good point about physical vs digital.
I'm still not sure if my children for example, understands that when I'm staring at an iPad I'm almost always reading a book. Does a vast library in iBooks translate to them as well as the same library on physical books in a bookshelf in the house? My sense is it does not.
And when I'm gone, will anyone find any interest in my iBook library? In its highlights and notes? In the books I've read and re-read dozens of times?
Some of my fondest memories are going over my older or deceased family members' book shelves. I have never, however, gone over anyone's tablet. Part of that is because it's newer, but something about the browse-ability of an e-book misses the mark. I can't see which book is worn from being read and re-read, or brimming with notes and scribbles. In digital, it's hard to tell which books that person found significant, but in physical it's obvious by the condition (or even number of copies) of the book.
One of my most treasured books is a copy of Goethe's _Faust_ (in translation) with notes from a nun.
That runs very much counter to how collectors actually collect books currently. The more pristine the book, the better, aside from particularly rare or valuable inscriptions.
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My university regularly put discarded books in a cart in front of the library with a money box, so you could just take a book and put one or two euros in the box. Among other things I got a copy of Benoit Mandelbrots "The fractal geometry of nature" which I still treasure to this day.
That's one of my treasures, too. I paid full price for a hardcover. Many of our books come from second hand dealers, often nature/history/tooling/photography foci. I'm a sucker for thematic histories, large format photography books, and well researched non fiction in general. If you like the marks on books, try postcards! I have ~20,000 of them. Not really sure why, but they're very interesting to scroll through. A card is like a little clue in to a time and place you would never otherwise think of ... logistics networks, handwriting, language, printing technology, inks, subjects of interest, urban development, architecture, fashion: sometimes with messages to boot!
Today's his birthday!
My late mother was an avid reader of library books. She used to mark the books she had read by filling in the loops of the letters on the copyright page. Apparently she noticed the hidden codes that other readers used to similarly mark books they had read: a circle around page 10, a line on page 20, &c.
I wonder if the author has come across such marks?
My late father would put a little star on the last page of the book. He eventually discovered another patron was marking books in a similar fashion and that they had the same taste in books. Whenever he found the other mark he would check out that book.
Do people forget which books they've read? If there's something I haven't finished, the sense of incompletion stays with me forever.
I always liked the hardback editions of children’s books in UK libraries in the 70s and 80s , and have sought them out secondhand since. Favourites were the US Danny Dunn science story series - almost all of which were amazingly available in the UK, Dr Who hardback editions of the famous Target novelisations - pre-vcr the only way to access old stories (even in the Uk these were very rarely repeated). Hugh Walters 1960s/1970s sf books (passage to Pluto, journey to Jupiter, expedition Venus etc.)
Also the Agaton Sax comedy detective stories, and the largely unknown Uncle the elephant books by JP Martin.
Favorite ex-library book: "The Unix Environment" by A. N. Walker. Ex library: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NY. Cost from Alibris: $1.
Never heard of Alibris, any other good used book sites? I have bought a book from Abebooks: "Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach", by Objective-C creator Brad Cox.
There is a charity bookshop in my city that exclusively sells ex-library books from the city's libraries. It's very tempting to buy the books there due to them usually being in very good condition.
One of my favorites that I return to regularly and am continually fascinated by is an ex-library book, Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century. It's an "enthno-archealogical" study of about 30 families in early 2000s California.
I love the ambiance of libraries and used book stores so I tend to buy books with a little wear and tear and appreciate their uniqueness.
At the same time I'm loathe to make my own marks in books. I hadn't thought about that contradiction before.
I try to only mark if I think it'll be useful to me, or to someone in the future. I'll lightly mark the location of favorite passages in the margins (that's useful to me, at least, and minimally intrusive), record some information about some obscure reference to a location by an antiquated name that I was only able to track down in some decades-old humanities paper, mark up the TOC with information I wish it had, that kind of thing.
I don't mind most marks from previous readers. Usually I'd rather have them than not, as they're at least interesting in one way or another.
The category of used book with annotations that I don't ever like to buy is one where a previous owner highlighted or underlined seemingly half the book. There's a kind of reader out there who must highlight or underline their books the same way I compulsively select text as I read on a screen, and it wrecks the book.
Can I just drop a word of love and appreciation for Abe Books? I don't buy physical books a lot, but when I do, Abe is definitely the first place I look. The books drop ship from the actual seller, and it's remarkable that I've never had a problematic delivery, after a dozen or so.
My favorite book I've gotten from them was A Psalm for the Wild-Built, which was previously a library book, funny enough.
Sad that it's part of the Amazon behemoth.
behold bookfinder.com
About finding fascinating hand scribbled notes from books of the past ...
I discovered this in a scanned collection of old books maintained by our government ministry of culture ...
there are comments on some pages (see pages 8, 11, 17 for example) including the cover. in some places the scribbler who seems be an authority on the subject himself expresses some rebuttals/commentary on the text's shortcomings
Book Title: Vocabulary of Gentoo and English
link: https://indianculture.gov.in/rarebooks/vaokaaabaularaii-apha...
PS: this was the first time I stumbled across, and discovered that "Gentoo" was another name used by the British for the "Telugu" language of Southern India. I am a native speaker of Telugu and I never knew this fact.
My beautifully bound 1898 score of Mendelssohn's 'Songs without Words' picked up for a song (sorry!) in a junk shop, has the inscription "To Ethyl with love from Mother and Dad Aug. 16th 1911". A treasured item in my library with additional resonance.
I have a fun copy of Mechanized Information Storage, Retrieval And Dissemination (1968) formerly from The Free Library of Philadelphia, covered in "identification required" labels for some reason. There's also a Cinema Props stamp inside the cover, so it may have been set dressing in between the library and the used book store where I got it. https://www.librarything.com/work/17927078/book/215905873
Just a few weeks ago I got an absolutely delightful email:
> Ні! This might seem a little out of the blue and it is but a few years ago at a library book sale I got the book "Pi in the Sky". It has your personal library stamp on it, so I guess YOU got it at a library sale and then re-donated it? I had never read anything about math before that was at all interesting and it got me reading lots of other "popular" math books and I got really interested in number theory. I am now a freshman at CMU and planning to be a math major!
> Sadly, ex-library books have a poor reputation because an old library book can have many miles on the clock
Depends on the clientele. I love finding ex-Bohemian-Club-library books, for example, because they are absurdly well cared for. My most recent one of these was a copy of “San Francisco's Ocean Trade Pᴀsᴛ ᴀɴᴅ Fᴜᴛᴜʀᴇ — A Story of the Deep Water Service of San Francisco, 1848 to 1911.” (1911) because I was very familiar with the coming of the railroads but not so familiar with anything earlier than that: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/San_Fran...
Loved the bit about one of the early steamships used to carry freight up and down the Sacramento River getting outclassed by an ox team — moo moo moo https://i.imgur.com/GVCVY0r.jpeg
I have a few ex-library books. Ex-library to 'ex libris', if you will! I bought them at used book stores and can't fight the sneaking suspicion that I am in possession of stolen property!
I love heavily marked up used books. They make me feel a kinship with another person. Me and "Dan" from 1956 have physically held the same copy of Terman's Electronic and Radio Engineering!
Two very important books for me were both bought in the same library clearance sale when I was around 6/7!
1. A biology text book which is how I learned about sex! 2. Children's Britannica World of Science & Mystery "FUTURE CITIES" which inspired my love for the future and technology, and still has pride of place on my bookshelf. I even wrote a lil thread on Twitter about it [0]
[0] https://x.com/TheOisinMoran/status/1389697743480926210
My favorite ex-library book was "Engineering with Nuclear Explosives", discarded from the Stanford engineering library.[1]
[1] https://archive.org/details/engineeringwithn00plowrich/mode/...
And sometimes you find little gems, too!
I have a copy of "New Rules for the New Economy" by Kevin Kelly, signed as part of the Global Business Network that he and Steward Brand founded a long time ago.
Having read Fred Turner's immensely great book "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", that is a valuable little piece of history to me.
Growing up as a kid with not much money, I think quite a few of the books on my shelves were ex library books.
Danger!
I made the mistake of following the link to AbeBook's list of books for sale. As a result, I spent $60.
You have been warned.
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