obit

Notes in Books thanks Karine for her tireless efforts here and abroad. Karine: you make the world a better place, one obituary at a time. And your chili is delicious!

Rudyard Kipling's Verse, Doubleday.


The spine:

 The clippings, adhered to the back inside pages:

Aside from steering The Princeton Tiger, the University's student-run humor publication, toward profitability almost two decades after F. Scott Fitzgerald helmed the editorial board, Mr. Todd Harris founded Creative Plastics Corporation and owned patent US2813349, a device that molded commercial-grade hard plastics for sundry application, including the referenced black box housing for the Nassau Hall Bicentennial U.S. Postage Stamp. Very neat.

Additional clippings:

 Eightballers? Katie, wtf is this?

 And:

English, dude. Duh!

Rosetta Stone Required

Guest Post #3!

Eric found this cool note of scribblings: one English, several of unknown origin. Probably not the glyphs of an alien species, but my guess is the smooth loops of Arabic.

Eric sez:

I'm not certain what language the marginalia is in this used copy of The Buddhist Tradition. What I am sure of is that my phone takes better pictures than my camera.

The note on top:

No clue:

Yes, you are reading that correctly:

("Ben complete shenanigans")


No cover art, but here is the spine:

Thanks, Eric (aka Guest Poster #3)!

After the fall

Sometimes I find simple notes. Names, dates, phone numbers. But on occasion there are notes like Adam's, which just sap the energy out of you. Many thanks, Adam, for sending in your note:

It's the only reason I bought the book. There's a bunch of writing on the back inside cover, but the front inside cover is my favorite part.

The book is the Academy Classics edition of Three Narrative Poems (by Coleridge, Arnold, and Tennyson), edited by George A. Watrous, A.M. Copyright 1898.

Here's my best effort at a transcription. Enjoy!

"Francisco Meek
Suelo floor
techo ceiling

Francisco Meik the
Spanish Terror

Born Oct. 30(?), 1912.
Fell in love with Maxine
Darrow Sept. 9, 1927 Married
her ..., 19

this is past
and forgotten
it is history
Signed
Frank A. Meek"

[Opposite side:]

"Frank Meek
v.s.
Maxine Darrow"

A gangland chronicle or just OCD?

Amy found a doozy of a note for notesinbook's first guest post (thanks, Amy!):

I picked this one up at Aardvark Books, on Church Street in the Castro.  I was looking for a vacation read that wouldn't embarrass me in front of my smart DC friends.  This one combined a notable author name with a shiny cover.  I'm not proud of my criteria, but there it is.

Budget constraints dictated that I only buy one book that day, so when I had narrowed down my search to two--this and something else I can't remember--I started flipping through both and found two things that tipped the decision to Glamorama.  The first was a train ticket to Berlin, dated May 22, 2009; someone else had taken this book on a trip.  The second was this note, which reads:

"Welcome back,
Everything went fine.  A worker showed up at 4 pm, checked the meter in the closet, under sink & bathroom.  He was never alone and it lasted no more than 10 min.  [Back]  Ate some nuts.  Hurry up now and have a great time tonight.
EC [?]
PS  no receipts"

My guess is that this was written by an extremely uncomfortable houseguest, asked to do a small favor for an overly-protective homeowner.  I think that EC is going to be sure to be out of the house tonight when the homeowner returns to change for the opera, but, having little money, will return to watch TV once s/he's sure the house will be empty.