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Letter to the editor

The secret lives of books

Open up a musty volume in a used bookstore, and you may be rewarded with more than its original contents.

By KIM CROSS
Published July 13, 2004

[Times photos: Bob Croslin]

This bud's for you: A pressed flower leaves its shadow behind in Gray's Lessons and Manual of Botany.

	Blackmail material? This photograph of an anonymous troupe fell out of Kitchener: The Man Behind the Legend.
	Thoreau's journals bear more than one man's thoughts.
	This note from the U.S. Treasury, dated 1863, records $5 given to the family of a soldier in the Virginia Regiment during the Civil War. The owners of Old Tampa Book Co. found it in an old book and removed it for their private collection.

There it is, between pages 208 and 209, sandwiched between "grand" and "greatness." In a yellowed copy of Roget's Thesaurus, a story unfolds.

The opening bars of Beetoven's "Sonata Pathetique Cminor" came to an abrupt stop as door 2 opened to admit three people.

It's a short story, imperfectly spelled, from English 104, folded and tucked in the pages. Set in an asylum, the story tells of a pianist who goes mad trying to master the sonata's fourth movement. The inscription on the inside cover of the thesaurus reads:

To Zoe

First Prize

Short Story Contest 1941

Miss Kelly

Half a century after it was typed, Zoe's prize-winning paper popped out of an old volume we found at Haslam's Book Store in St. Petersburg. The story of the story is a cliffhanger. What became of Zoe Ross? Why did she part with her prize? Is she even still alive?

For answers, see Roget's, Page 319:

Mystery, n. riddle, enigma. See secret.

For bibliophiles with time to kill, riddles and remnants of previous owners await discovery in secondhand books. Pressed flowers. Receipts. Love notes. Toilet paper. And sometimes papers worth a whole lot more.

Take a look. These scraps are clues to stories within stories.

At Haslam's, which bills itself as Florida's largest new and used bookstore, the shelves are bursting with 300,000 books. About 200,000 are used.

Employees thumb through each arriving truckload of used books, looking for writing, stains, bugs. Often they find only dust. But occasionally they discover evidence of readers who put more than their nose in a book.

Raymond Hinst III, son of owner Ray Jr., has found shamrocks, notes, locks of hair. His oddest discovery was a series of snapshots of a man with sundry celebrities: Katie Couric, Jackie Chan, Zsa Zsa Gabor.

"Their faces were in exactly the same spot in each photo," says Hinst, whose great-grandparents, John and Mary Haslam, opened the store in 1933. "It was creepy. I could hear the music from The X-Files."

His most memorable find was a Civil War letter containing a lock of hair. The letter, inside an inexpensive book from the late 1890s, had "penmanship so perfect and uniform, like some French nobleman wrote it." It might as well have been French, with its ornate flourishes. "I couldn't read it," Hinst says.

A dig through Haslam's shelves on a recent day produces an eclectic yield. Mongolian stamps in The Cat and the Curmudgeon. In Reader's Digest, a 29-cent bargain book: a 5-cent Dream Whip coupon, undated but "good for 60 days." Sophomoric art and commentary cover the pages of Three Narrative Poems, a textbook from the 1920s. A student scribbled a list on the inside cover: Fellows I have gone with at Roosevelt High. Next to one of the seven names she wrote, I love you. Honest I do.

In a 1927 "scarce" edition of The Heart of Thoreau's Journals is a 5-cent Thoreau stamp, a 1958 New York Times magazine story about Emerson and Thoreau, and a postcard of a cairn near the author's hut.

On the back of the postcard, the reader has sketched a map of the monument: two cairns, four granite posts, a worn path to Walden Pond. The reader records an inscription atop a cairn:

Beneath these stones lies the chimney foundation of Thoreau's Cabin 1845-1847. "Go thou my incense upwards from this hearth."

Most of the time, Haslam's leaves the bonus inside the book. Even though newsprint stains the page with its high acidic content, the Hinsts let it stay.

"We don't see any reason to break it up," the elder Hinst says. "Some things were meant for other people to have."

At Juan's Used Books & Collectibles in St. Petersburg, the most curious curios aren't among the novelties. They're in the novels. A feather. Packaging for Truarc pliers. A photograph of a little girl in a hat; jotted on the back, the word "spurious."

Handwritten VCR operating instructions - 1. Put in tape the direction of arrow - are stuffed between the pages of Dubcek, a biography of a Czechoslovakian leader. "If trouble call Rich," the note says. (Called Rich. The number no longer works.)

A crumbling 1887 edition of Gray's Lessons and Manual of Botany is filled, appropriately, with pressed flowers. The bloom on Page 342 has disappeared, but its shadow remains in a flower-shaped stain.

The Diners' Club Drink Book is filled with recipes. They have been clipped from newspapers, scribbled in margins, taped and stuffed throughout. Bundled with Parade magazine's "Nutty Pie with a Surprise Crust" and an eggnog recipe scribbled on a hair net package is a poignant note.

Dear Mom, I stutter and writing is easier. For 2 weeks I've had trouble with my gums. . . . He can't afford a doctor. Will she sell him penicillin? (Is Mom a pharmacist?) He signs his full name, with middle initial.

In a dilapidated turn-of-the-century volume of Caesar's Gallic War, pages of academic notes and verb conjugations interrupt the text. Look closer and find "A View From a Window." The disembodied journal entry, laden with adjectives, describes a sunset over rolling hills, as seen from a room with a view.

Even when the clues aren't quite so articulate, you can learn a lot about anonymous readers beyond their taste in literature.

Whoever read Mia & Woody: Love and Betrayal had a penchant for rye bread, Bumblebee tuna and chunky veggie beef stew, if you go by the grocery list scribbled inside. A previous owner of Brando preferred the Arigato steakhouse. Or maybe the ad was just a bookmark.

Store owner Juan Daly flips through the books but lets their contents be. Once in a while he'll keep something for himself: Catholic prayer cards, a postcard from his native Cuba, and once - just once - a $20 bill.

"Most of the time I leave (things) in," he says. "Especially if it's notes and letters. They belong with the book."

Not all of the surprises are pleasant.

"The worst thing I found was a piece of bacon," says Colleen Smith, a library assistant at the Mirror Lake branch of St. Petersburg's public library. It was raw.

The owners of Page by Page, also in St. Petersburg, have found a pair of panties and a panty liner - in two different books.

Photographs of a naked man turned up in a golf book someone bought from Old Tampa Book Co., which usually cleans its titles well. Fortunately, the customer had a sense of humor.

Tales of romance, tragedy, history and mystery sometimes find their way into stacks of other genres.

A get-well card in Symbolism of the Celtic Cross alludes to tragedy. Sorry to hear about your fall. Hope your up and around soon. Brian, the sender, has included his senior portrait, in which he's wearing a starched Tommy Hilfiger button-down shirt, an eager smile and a scar on his right eyebrow.

Looking for romance? Try teen paperbacks. Faking It contains traces of adolescent love. Chapter 5, Page 52: Jeff loves Kelly. Kelly and Jeff. I'm lost in you!

Some people believe there's treasure to be found.

"I had a guy come in with a metal detector. He went through the whole place looking to find gold coins in the spines of books," says Mike Slicker, owner of St. Petersburg's Lighthouse Books. "He didn't find any."

Historians may have better luck.

Shelved with other expensive collectibles, The Huguenot Society of America, a musty 1900 tome, contains a letter written with a quill pen and green ink on Feb. 12, 1919. The letter is unsigned, but the author's voice rings hauntingly clear.

I am now at a Sanitarium in Connecticut, alone and very despondent but a little better or I could not be writing, very sorry I missed your dinner, I should have enjoyed it very much.

At Old Tampa Book Co., co-owner David Brown gingerly unfolds a brittle note.

"We found this in a book the other day," he says.

Dated "the 24th day of February, 1801," it's a letter from the Commonwealth of Virginia to the sheriff of Bedford County, asking for 18 pounds to repay a debt and 4 pounds in damages.

In a second person's script, a reply: I will be bail for the defendant.

The problem with these secondhand stories, as literature, is that they have no ending. Or they have infinite endings.

We may never know what became of Zoe Ross, author of Sonata Pathetique. A visit to her last known address in St. Petersburg was a dead end. She would be about 77 now. In the high-rise full of seniors, no one remembers her name.

And yet . . .

At Lighthouse Books, a love story emerges from a hard-cover copy of Jimmy Buffett's Where Is Joe Merchant? It's in a Hallmark card with a big red heart (the book's cover, coincidentally, also bears a heart).

Dear Terri,

Well, we are on our way to Panama, getting ready to go through the canal; then on to Houston or New Orleans to load up grain for Egypt. Thankfully I won't have to make that trip, and I shall soon be able to hold you tight in my arms. I can hardly wait. I hope you're ready for me.

Love,

Scott

Alas, Terri never got to read those words. The card, still sealed in its envelope, was never sent. But now the card is read to her over the phone, nearly seven years too late. She's pleasantly surprised and responds with a breathless, "Oh my god!"

Scott was "a great love," Terri says. Her last name is Moerch, and she lives in Largo. She and Scott dated for five years, moved in together. He was a chef on an oil tanker, which is probably where he wrote the card. They broke up nearly seven years ago, and she hasn't heard from him in ages. She's 42 now, and married.

The card - hidden away in Where Is Joe Merchant? - had once passed through Terri's hands without her knowing it. She remembers seeing the book on her shelf long after the breakup.

"I probably ended up giving it to Goodwill."

- Kim Cross can be reached at kcross@sptimes.com or 727 893-8352. Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

[Last modified July 12, 2004, 13:05:39]