The Adventures of Used Books

Used books always seem so different to me from new books. A book is such a personal thing, more so than the typical objects that people carry around. Maybe it’s because I’m such an avid reader, but I think a person’s book says a lot about someone.

Books get carried around with you, and I think that when you reread them, it brings you back to what you were doing when you first read them. So it tells two stories, the one inside the pages and the one outside the pages. And I think that’s really unique to physical books, it isn’t quite the same with an ebook, since you can’t splash water on it or mark up the pages. So it doesn’t show the same stuff as a physical book.

So really the choice of a book and how the owner feels about it says quite a lot about them. But then the decision to give it away probably even more so. To be completely done with a book, I think I’ve really only felt that way about textbooks or little kid books (because I’m not going to reread Curious George Uses the Potty or whatever). I don’t know, it’s probably easier for other people than it is for me.

I can’t buy or read a used book without wondering about its past. Who was the previous owner? How did they treat this book? What does the message inside the cover mean? Where has this book gone? What has it seen? Books seem to have whole secret lives separate from ours, and I think that’s beautiful and fascinating.