You know, once upon a time, I was going to have a blog dedicated completely to found bookmarks, the things I have found in books that marked previous reader’s places in books they apparently never completed. Of course, once I got the notion and started writing rather long-form posts researching the things, I stopped finding interesting things in books. At some point, I think I imported the posts from that blog into this one, and the Found Bookmarks category here before today only numbered three items. Hard to make a living as a blogger with a bunch of obscure blogs when you can’t frequently update them.
I seem to go through spurts of it; I read a lot of books that do not have someone else’s place markers in them, and then suddenly I have stuff falling out of all sorts of books. The type of book I read probably determines this a bit–I don’t find a lot of found bookmarks in Executioner or short paperbacks, art monographs, collections of poetry, or nice editions of Great Literature. Readers probably finish genre fiction, and they either don’t pick up the others to read or finish them. Some books, like nonfiction, probably get abandoned more than others. The source of the book probably also matters: I think the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library goes through the books for personal effects before they mark them, and book stores might, too, so my best source for found bookmarks is probably garage sales and maybe church or more amateur book sales–neither of which I have been haunting recently.
But I recently picked up Abridged Treasury of Prayers, a collection of prayers published by Concordia Publishing House in St. Louis. I knew it had some things tucked in the front cover (meaning what I found was not, technically, a bookmark). To be honest, I am not sure where I got the book–I thought I inherited it, but maybe not.
What I found WILL SHOCK YOU! CLICK HERE FOR MORE:
Okay, it won’t shock you. I found a letter in an envelope, a photo, and a postcard. I looked at them, trying to determine if they were my great aunts or second cousins, and I don’t recognize either the names or the people in the photos.
According to the postmark, the letter was mailed on September 17, 1951, from a sister (?) to her sister or sister-in-law from Lemay, Missouri, (where I lived for a time and where a lot of my family lived back in the day) to a relation or relations in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
Was the recipient on vacation? Visiting family? That’s quite a trek from Lemay in 1951.
The envelope contained a letter. Did I read it? Of course I did. I am nosey, and if this is some sort of MacGuffin in an adventure story, I want to know what’s going on. Not that a true MacGuffin would be informative at all.
It kind of feels like peeping, but it doesn’t contain family secrets or anything.
The writer says she wishes she was with the gang and gives a brief update about the weather, about what everyone is doing, and about baking for the church social. Nothing really personal, just a breezy note from back in the era when a breezy note like this was required since a phone call would have been prohibitively expensive. Just a glimpse into life in a small outskirt of the St. Louis area in the middle of the century.
The trove in the front of the prayer book also yielded a postcard that was never sent:
I assume that the postcard writer was picked up at the bus depot anyway. But without a postmark, we can less authoritatively speculate that the postcard writer was coming back from the aforementioned vacation.
Finally, the book contained a photograph.
Unless they had their son late, or I suppose if that’s not a son but a nephew, the people in the photo are younger than I am. But due to the mid-century look, they look much older. Lileks could probably place the photo within a couple of years based on the fashion, but I can only tell that it’s an old picture.
The edge at the top indicates this was removed from a comb-bound book at some time. The back has no indication of who this is. Gentle reader, I have boxes of old photos from my own relatives with black and white images of people I don’t know and that are unmarked, so I always put the person’s name and the year when I send out photos–mostly school or athletic pictures of my boys to my grandmother. That way, indifferent generations hence will have something to read before pitching them in the trash.
My best guess is that this book belonged to the sister who was on vacation in Stanley, New York. Perhaps the photo is of the letter writer and her husband and son. I can only speculate.
So what do I do with this now?
To be honest, I am not sure. I mean, if I throw the contents into the box of old unsorted mementoes, that’s just kicking the can down the road for my heirs to throw them out. I hate to let ephemera like this go, though. I think I have a Found Bookmarks folder that contains the things I have found in books and have posted about; perhaps I will put them here.
Except for the envelope; that, I shall donate. The local church ladies league collects old stamps that they somehow bulk package for philatelists (or philanderers–whichever collects stamps–and also note that these categories probably don’t overlap all that often). So they’ll get a couple grubzits out of the stamp and a 1951 postmark. More than the modern few stamps that I normally put in the box, anyway.
So where did I get this book, anyway? I might have inherited it from my sainted mother or my aunt. I might have picked it up on bag day at a church book sale in the early part of this century. How long did the owner keep these items in it? Did she tuck them in the book in the 1950s and they languished there when she passed away, unfound by her own people until the book made its way to another estate, another downsizing?
I don’t know why I like to speculate on these things so much, but it’s better than speculating on current affairs anyway.
