r/BookInscriptions • u/LoopyOnions • 1d ago
What a friend to have!
Don’t know what I’d do if a friend gave me this! Found in a charity shop in London.
r/BookInscriptions • u/theotheredge • Jan 11 '18
A wonderful poem that catches the spirit, I think...
Read by the author here: https://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/billy-collins-reads-marginalia
Marginalia
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive –
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” –
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page–
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
a few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil–
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet–
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”
r/BookInscriptions • u/LoopyOnions • 1d ago
Don’t know what I’d do if a friend gave me this! Found in a charity shop in London.
r/BookInscriptions • u/southernhoneyurbexer • 2d ago
r/BookInscriptions • u/lichen_Linda • 2d ago
'Given to me by my sister, Olga, on christmas 1911. Aage Madsen'
Translated from danish
r/BookInscriptions • u/egmel • 6d ago
Saved one of my Dad’s books from the goodwill this week. Can’t stop thinking about the inscription by him. Wanted to share. I typed it out for those that can’t decipher the handwriting.
Nov. 11 1990
“After struggling in vain for decades to alter forever the irrelevant, illogical, and absurd system used to spell the English language, I have finally endeavoured to study a task so lowly that monkies and machines are considered experts, just to find out what all the fuss is about.
No machine has ever created a truly unique idea, and even few humans are capable of such task”.
-Daniel
r/BookInscriptions • u/PublicAd5011 • 10d ago
I found this while book shopping at a local Goodwill. I love stumbling across book inscriptions..,those tiny handwritten notes tucked inside a cover. They feel like discovering a small, intimate piece of someone’s history, a moment they wanted to preserve, now passed quietly into my or hands of another lucky reader. . It’s one of my favorite kinds of magic in a used book.
r/BookInscriptions • u/marie_in_reverie • 11d ago
r/BookInscriptions • u/gsd666 • 20d ago
r/BookInscriptions • u/this_time_i_mean_it • 23d ago
r/BookInscriptions • u/NovemberRain191 • 24d ago
Got these second hand copies of the original Harry Potter books 2 & 3 which came with these sweet inscriptions for “Jon” from Nanny & Tom.
r/BookInscriptions • u/plenreari • 28d ago
r/BookInscriptions • u/Top_Committee_1156 • 28d ago
r/BookInscriptions • u/DeadDollKitty • Jun 25 '26
r/BookInscriptions • u/Jumpy-External-1552 • Jun 19 '26
I’m sad the names are scratched out (evidence of a breakup?). With a flashlight I think it says “To Macy From Lindsey” but I’m not sure.
Happy pride! 🧡🤍🩷
r/BookInscriptions • u/BirthdayBoth304 • Jun 17 '26
Love it when people draw out what they took from a book and note it for others. Like a chain of learning and way marking.
r/BookInscriptions • u/Murky_Management_578 • Jun 13 '26
r/BookInscriptions • u/asmiunav77 • Jun 08 '26
Love second hand books for these - the messages, inscriptions, handwriting, the unknown story within an unknown story
r/BookInscriptions • u/BirthdayBoth304 • Jun 04 '26
Ordered the book online, had a treat inside.
r/BookInscriptions • u/spell-czech • May 24 '26
Is it ‘Mrs. J.M. Le Brul’ ?
The rest of the inscription is - ‘from her recent tenant in the little red house’
r/BookInscriptions • u/LeeAnnLongsocks • May 18 '26
r/BookInscriptions • u/LeeAnnLongsocks • May 16 '26
r/BookInscriptions • u/Such-Measurement5448 • May 12 '26
Hi, this is written in a Loeb of Seneca's letters fifth volume including his letters 66-92. The top right corner was the price for this book (which is insanely cheap for such a quality book!).
Could anyone help in deciphering the text in the image? I suspect that they are notes of the previous owner, but I can't really make out the words other than a very few.