I was rather upset to not find anything for the Book Traces website. I find the overall idea and assignment super fascinating and hoped to find something interesting or at least authentic in my search but I unfortunately had no luck. I spent over three hours searching the stacks for a book with some sort of writing in it. I looked all through poetry, literature, letters, history, religion and more. I really felt confident that poetry or literature would have something and spent most of my time in the PR and PS section. Overall, I was really disappointed.

I found a few books with pencils markings and writing in them but I had no way of telling when that was done for example, The Life of Sterne by Percy Fitzgerald and Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin. One book The English Poets  by T.H. Ward got me especially excited because it appeared to be marked all over with notes about the poems and inferred meanings behind certain symbols but on further examination I realized the writing was too current as on one of the final pages it was dated for a lesson plan. For a few others the writing was clearly done in ballpoint pen. I also found books that had what I thought to be markings but turned out to be printed that way like Life and Letters by Robert Browning which had what I thought was a signature but sadly wasn’t. One book tricked me because I thought it contained a handwritten letter from the late 1800s but the letter was bound into the book and was apart of the story. The closest I came to finding any sort of authentic ancient article was a receipt in a book from 2004. Everything else seemed to be a dead end.

I do not really understand how I did not find anything as I looked through a variety of books and focused on the two sections that seemed to have the most luck for other people. A section like poetry or literature would seem to have a lot of writing in it as people try to deceiver what the author is trying to say or as they make comparisons to their own life. There were also a few books that were about other languages such as Irish and Scottish books and I hoped that they would have markings about the translations or something along those lines but again nothing. In all, I enjoyed looking through the well over 50 books and wish I had found something but the appearance of the books themselves with interesting some had marble like patterns on the seems and one book had pink pages but I never found what I set out to find.