Chapter 153 Ephemeral Items Found in Books

Books come my way. Friends and relatives who know I’m a bookseller sometimes give me old books that they just don’t want. Usually, they aren’t books I want either, but I always take a look. If the book turns out to be something I think I can sell, I offer to buy it from them. Other times, I am left to donate the abandoned book, unwanted by both me or its owner, to the library.

Recently, my mother’s friend gave her a Bible to pass on to me. It had originally belonged to another friend of a friend. No one wanted it anymore, and my mother’s friend gave her the Bible thinking I might be able to sell it. “If you can’t,” she said, “just go ahead and donate it to the library.” Bibles, printed in the hundreds of millions of copies, are not usually rare or financially valuable.

This particular Bible was printed in 1868, and as with most family Bibles of the time, had some notations and newspaper clippings inside, documenting some family history. Before putting the book in the donation pile, I read through the notations and clippings. You never know when you might find something interesting.

Newspaper clippings from the 1890s told the sad story of the original owners of this Bible:

There are numerous other clippings in this Bible, telling of marriages, births, deaths. Perhaps the most poignant is this next one:

I wonder if she is the daughter of the man who committed suicide in the article above, but because her last name is different from the man who killled himself, I don’t have enough information here to be certain.

Note the death date of 1978 at the bottom. 81 years passed from Lillian’s birth to her death — almost a century. She recorded the early part of her life, and a descendant recorded her passing from this world. This Bible may have been the bedrock of this family’s religious values, but it is also an important family chronicle, a way of preserving the voices of the heroes of ordinary life — the hard-working (or not) men, the valiant (or not) widows, the children trying (or not) to be good. Bibles aren’t a collecting focus for most book collectors, but perhaps, as vessels of family histories, they ought to be.