The Secret Stories of Book Inscriptions

The bespoke dedications found in secondhand books, notes the Guardian, often open onto narratives almost as intriguing as the books they preface.

From the piece...

Undoubtedly, there is an element of voyeurism involved in this bibliophilic kink. I know that I am often reading something intensely private and intended for someone else's eyes. Also, books are arguably among the most intimate and loaded of gifts due to the time and concentration the recipient is required to invest in them. Often the choice of book coupled with the message within can suggest a narrative of its own. For example, a message inside a copy of Aharon Shabtai's poetry collection J'Accuse would appear to be from a jilted lover and is quite striking in its passive-aggressive tone ("hope you'll find the poet's work more accessible than my obscure efforts to say some similar things.") Meanwhile, the incongruity of giving George Orwell's 1984 as a romantic gift (with the clumsy reasoning "This book was published in 1949, it was about the future 1984. I have given it to you with love in 1994, the start of our future") makes it quite easy to draw one's own conclusions as to how that particular relationship panned out. In another case, the copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's Words given to "mummy" with the instructions that she "read it all without prejudice" appears to have been chosen with the cover artwork in mind, which bears the text "I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it". Ouch.

But, for me, the overriding emotion evoked by these inscriptions is one of pathos. All are basically records of human connections - or at least attempts at human connections - given added weight by the fact that all these books have been discovered among the shelves of second-hand book shops and for whatever reason they are no longer in the hands of the dedicees.