This week we were assigned to do Book Traces and search for marginalia, it was really fun to do this assignment but it took me about 15 books to find one that I could use. I feel like it was a good thing that not so many books have writings on it because they are library books, which means that people have to take care of them. My nineteenth century book is titled “The Divine Vision”, it contains poems and is from 1904 -apparently back then people really loved writing on books and highlighting quotes, because this one is completely marked.

I couldn’t understand what is written in there, but we can see that it is a name and a date -1900-, probably this year means something to whoever wrote it because the book is from 1904, and obviously there’s no way he wrote it before the book was published.

Again, I couldn’t understand these writings entirely, and it frustrated me that I couldn’t figure out the first word on The Twilight of Earth, because he wrote it repeatedly all over the book, so it probably means something important to him or to his reading. Now, about the third photo, we can see “aspiration/hope” and it makes sense if we analyze this quote: “Oh, pity, only seer, who looking through/ A heart melted like dew,/ Seest the long perished in the present thus,/ For ever dwell in us.”

There’s not much to talk about, but I’m still struggling with that mysterious word and the reason why he wrote it so many times, but I guess I’ll never know. I’m really happy with this assignment though, searching old books through the library was unexpected and made me realize that although we are separated through different centuries we can still be connect through the books and the reading.