Communication via Library Books
There’s an unexpected side effect of patronizing a library, which is that it affords you occasional, strangely intimate glances into the lives of other people, without you ever knowing who these other people are.
The way this happens is through stuff that previous book borrowers leave in books. Like a lot of people, apparently, I take the approach of using library checkout receipts as bookmarks. And, like a lot of people, I don’t always remember to take them out before returning books. So sometimes, I open a book and someone else’s reading habits fall out. More than once I’ve discovered other interesting books from these. It works sort of like Pandora for books.
More fascinating, however, is when people leave in pieces of paper other than checkout receipts. Recently I found a sheet of paper from a hotel notepad. The hotel was in Texas. Did someone take this book with them to Texas? Did they go to Texas, take the hotel’s notepad and bring it back here? I don’t know. I’ve also found a shopping list.
Most recently, I found a note from one person to another. It was in a book about Pittsburgh: part history, part guidebook. Apparently two people were going to take a trip to Pittsburgh together. The note was from one to the other, listing things from the guidebook that they could do, and expressing great excitement.
This was very weird for me. It was like eavesdropping on a private conversation with pillow-talky undertones. It’s not even clear that the message’s intended recipient saw it. Maybe the note’s author put the note in the book and the recipient just returned the book without opening it, which makes this whole thing even weirder. What if I’m the only person other than the author who read this note? Then I’d be sharing an oddly close connection with this person, whom I’ve never met, I’ve never seen, whose name I don’t know. But from the type of thing this person was excited about seeing in Pittsburgh (mainly off-the-beaten-path residential neighborhoods), I have some idea of what kind of person they are.
I’m probably thinking about this too much.
Now, though, I’m trying to devise a plan to use this communication channel proactively. Basically I have the power to send messages to people, targeted by taste in books. There’s a lot to think about here. How could I make this communication channel two-way? (Out-of-band communication, like writing a book-message containing an email address, would be cheating and would take all the fun out of it.) And what would I say? I’ll have to ruminate on it.
