IntraLibris
08.09.06 By Collin DavidSomething delicately and quietly flutters to the floor from between the pages of a book that hasn’t been opened in years, maybe decades. An old photograph, or a pressed leaf, or a scrap of paper with something cryptic written on it. Something ephemeral and effectively meaningless, but so rich with what it once meant that it’s irresistibly mysterious and precious.
And maybe this happens once or twice a day, when you work at a library. And maybe you’ve worked there for six long, underpaid years. And just MAYBE you’ve collected these things to make the job slightly more interesting and fulfilling and have a folder filled with them secreted somewhere among your more traditional collections.
Sure, they’re not all interesting. For every poem scribbled on the back of a magazine subscription card, there are a dozen torn bits of plain, unmarked paper and sprinklings of unwelcome cookie crumbs, but that one secret poem, it’s worth dealing with that little snot-nosed kid who’s pulling out every single water cooler cup, one by one, while his mother browses for new boyfriends on the public internet. I’ve kept the blank scraps of paper too, but not the crumbs.
After so many years and square footage of books and whatever unit you might measure the growth of an ulcer with, I’ve finally made sense of my collection, and I’m sharing it with the world.
I’m fascinated with books, and the stories within books, and the stories that are books and everything that the books themselves might experience. Things left between the pages and written in the margins are strange echoes of the true history of the book itself. They have exciting lives, and quiet lives, and travel longer distances than I have in my entire life. They’ve known 
more people than me, and frankly, I’m jealous. The collection began with a note from three kids to their ailing grandmother, whom they were not permitted to visit in the hospital because of age restrictions. It was a melancholy, yellowed thing, and it left me wondering if they ever DID see their grandmother again.
I haven’t limited my collection to things that fall out of books, as I’ve found myself taking photographs of those things that people might underline within books. Which sentences stood out as important to the reader? What clarifications and questions did they have while reading the book? What would possess someone to write within a book that wasn’t expressly a textbook? Because each one of these things is a story unto itself, branching out in all directions infinitely, there’s a whole new level of fable and fascination.
The first underlined book that I added to my collection was a first edition Ayn Rand book, which was incidentally signed by (presumably) the author. While it eventually found its way into the library discards because of the severe underlining, I was curious about what points the reader found especially poignant. After I later discovered that it was signed, financial restraints prompted me to sell the book. While it was purchased for a quarter and I offered no guarantee on the signature, it was sold for roughly 270 dollars. Collecting photographs of these things keeps the collection flat and manageable.
Check out this collection, with a new item added every day, at IntraLibris.
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Article Tags: Ayn Rand, book, IntraLibris, libraries================
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