Blotches, stains and other reminders of where and when you read a book
Perhaps subconsciously, you are marking your territory. The blots you leave will often be accidental, and yet they stamp authority over the book and assert that it belongs to its reader. When that book falls into your hands years later, these chance etchings are a reminder of the surroundings and era in which its words were gulped.
On page 27 of a novel, a sun-cream blotch shelters a speech mark: oh, that shabby bar in a Catalonian square, where the waitress was more beautiful than planet earth from space, where the wine was cheap and tasted cheaper, where the afternoons were born for reading with drowsy, contented eyes. On page 83 of a biography, a droplet of tea: oh, that train journey that seemed to last seven Sundays in a graveyard, the one with the damaged overhead lines near Peterborough, the one with the oversized man hemming you into your seat with elbows like pistons and shoulders broader than grey clouds over the Irish Sea, the one where only this book stood between you and criminality. Such triggers are not always so haphazard. The pages of a book are hiding places for receipts, bank advice slips, train tickets and restaurant calling cards. Perhaps they are lost bookmarks, perhaps intended keepsakes. Regardless, a book transports us elsewhere when we read it, and such items float us out of ourselves anew, perhaps into reminiscence, or a faint handshake with a time gone by. On its own, an old bus ticket is litter. Inside a book, it is a connection.
Such smears, smudges and ephemera bring a book back to you, and become a dateless, unintended diary entry. Page becomes time and place. Beside curling and scuffed leafs and bowing spines, they show how a scarred book is a loved one, a house that became a home.