In my travels into the library, finding a book that had writing in it was very difficult. This may be something to be happy about, that people are respectful of books, but in my case of research, it was not preferable. Upon finding the novel English Literature From the Beginning to the Norman Conquest on the highest shelf in the stacks of Sojourner Truth Library, I had confidence that this was the book I was looking for. And I was right to feel such a way, for when I opened the book I stumbled upon many mysterious inscriptions

In the first picture, the word God, amoung two others, is underlined. It is difficult to say what the intention was for underlining this word, but it is interesting to know that there is endless possibilities for the underlining of a word such as God. The word God has different meanings for every individual on Earth, therefore this word is especially mysterious in its placement. The two words in the other two pictures that are almost illegibly scribbled onto the pages are almost equally as mysterious as they are perceived to me to say “the same” and “the norman”.

The book itself was published in the United States in 1908, first edition in 1898. The author Stopford A. Brooke was born in 1832, and died in 1916 and was an Irish churchman, royal chaplain and writer. Since the novel itself is a collection of english literature and criticisms by the author himself, it is again difficult to connect the inscribed words to a reasoning for the existence. The greatest attribute of literature is that the author may intend something for the reader to grasp inside the writings of a book, but the reader himself will always find his own meaning of the words. This in itself is why these inscriptions are so interesting, and so very, very mysterious.