Used

I don't think I'd ever trade paper books for electronic ones, because I love the way that used books retain traces of those who read them before. My set of classics I read in high school AP english passed from me, to my friend Amy who was a year younger, to my sister. All three of us left traces in the books, and it's fascinating to reread them and see notes and drawings-all in glittery gel pen-from the three of us. I like that our thoughts and insights-juvenile and raw though they may be-have become part of the book. Re-reading The Great Gatsby because not just the story of Daisy and Nick and Gatsby, but also of our thoughts on character and symbolism, the french verbs I practiced conjugating on the inside of the back cover, Amy's careful cursive matching her first name and her boyfriend at the time's last name, Elizabeth's circled words and faulty definitions, all in sparkling purple ink. I drew careful geometric designs and flowers, while Amy sketched landscapes and animals and Libby didn't draw much at all. Our comments in those books tell a little bit about us and hopes and fears at those moments in time. Little traces, but they add a layer to the book that makes it worth so much more.


I bought a few used books on Amazon recently. One of them, a book of poems called American Primitive by Mary Oliver, had a tiny piece of paper tucked in it, marking a poem called John Chapman. The most recent owner-probably Victor, who wrote his name in the front cover, but who knows how many hands the book has passed through-had written in small handwriting "This is my favorite". I don't know who he was or why he loved the poem. Maybe he had a thing about Johnny Appleseed. Maybe he had to read it for class and liked the imagery of sharing a hollow tree for a bed with "a great slab or bear", or maybe he understood how John's "grey eyes brittled into ice" when he spoke of a deceptive former lover. Maybe he's another Midwesterner raised on tales of the stand of apple tree in the local woods that Johnny Appleseed almost definitely planted, who loves the poem out of a nostalgic ache for the cold woods Oliver describes so well.

I don't know if "John Chapman" is my favorite, but I like the last two stanzas:

Well, the trees he planted or gave away
prospered, and he became
the good legend, you do
what you can if you can; whatever

the secret, and the pain,

there's a decision: to die,
or to live, to go on
caring about something. In spring, in Ohio,
in the forests that are left you can still find
sign of him: patches
of cold white fire.