The assignment at hand was much easier said than done. After my first encounter at the library, I thought I’d hit the jackpot in no time. So much so that I decided to go rogue and hunt for a book in the stacks.

Walking in and out of the stacks felt almost like a maze, every aisle looked the same and you don’t know where you came from or how to find your way back to the particular aisle from which you came. It really is amazing the amount of books stacked into one floor. One thing I would like to say is the weird markers on each of the books didn’t make this feat all that much easier – to me it pretty much looked like ‘library speak’ for how to re-shelve returned books.

I went to the library three separate times to find the “perfect” example of marginalia (I am guilty of being a perfectionist), but to no avail. I hunted through the aisles, in search for all of the indicators of a Victorian book, and I was somewhat successful at this part of the deal. At first, I looked for rebounding, series & book size, the sewing of the pages to the actual cover, gold leafing – anything that would indicate to me, “this book is old”. What was troubling that the bounding technique (sewing of the pages to a cover that was just one cohesive cover) was used in several books dating long past 1923.

I found that a lot of the books that looked very worn were published mid-20^th Century. But then I remembered other indicators which were ridges on the binding and cover style. I realized this when I had given up hope one time and was walking through the stacks and saw in the distance, a book with obvious ridging on the side.

At that point I had become so desperate that I had literally gasped out loud. It was beautiful. I immediately attacked and went to open it, but again, no annotations.

After three separate searches through the library, I decided to stick with what I had originally found which is technically not marginalia, because it was done intentionally. It was a rebounded book entitled Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, 1864. In it I found a four page letter that was a facsimile to match the handwriting of Parker. The letter was written in 1856. I think that this is very interesting, because why would anyone want to make an exact copy of someone else’s handwriting? I assume he had to be a pretty important person.

I will probably be opening every Victorian book I spot in the library from here on, and hey, I might even find something worthwhile for Book Traces!

P.S.: I even found a series of books from the 17^th Century with a very similar style to that of a 19^th Century. They were the diaries of Samuel Pepys, and they contained news articles that were pasted to the books. I thought I’d include some pictures anyway.