Bought a secondhand copy of an economics textbook I didn’t need, purely because it had fallen open on the shop table to a page with a dense column of marginal notes in pencil, clearly from a student working through the same argument I happened to be reading over their shoulder forty years later. Somewhere around chapter six the notes get combative — ‘no’, underlined twice, next to a paragraph about interest rates — and then, two pages later, a small grudging ‘ok, fair’ where the author apparently won the point back.
This is the appeal of secondhand books that a new copy structurally can’t offer: the accidental archive left behind by whoever owned it before you. A pressed leaf used as a bookmark and forgotten. A receipt from a shop that no longer exists. Somebody’s argument with the author, conducted in pencil, that you get to read as if you’d found somebody else’s diary by accident, except the diary is specifically about this one book.
It connects to the same interest discussed in this note — the different things a mark in a book can mean — except here I’m reading someone else’s marks with none of the context that would tell me for certain which kind of mark I’m looking at. Was ‘no’ a considered disagreement or an exasperated interjection at 11pm before an exam? I’ll never know, which is exactly why it stayed interesting long enough to buy the book.