Book Traces

This is the Tumblr blog of Book Traces, a crowd-sourced web project that identifies unique copies of nineteenth and early twentieth-century books on library shelves. Readers left fascinating traces of the past when they wrote in their books, left notes and clippings, pressed flowers, and placed locks of hair between their pages. Submit your own finds at BookTraces.org!

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“Beauty seen is never lost, God’s colors all are fast” -John Greanleaf Whittier

UVA student find

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"Defeat on every side— But Oh, Not here the end is: think it not!"

Lehman Engle, Jackson-born playwright annotated this copy of a Euripides play!  2,000 year later peer editing.. Student find by Milsaps College Library

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Mr. R Stuart’s John Hancock in his book of Sermons also published in 1872.  Charles Deems was a pastor from Maryland who’s book was renamed The Light of Nations; Sermons in 1880

Student find Millsaps College

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"I have not loved the world, nor the world me" Find by Dr.Britton, UofSC. Poems and Dramas of Lord Byron

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A couple of avian friends in a Russian biography of the novelist Ivan Goncharov. 

See this post on the Book Traces @ UVA Twitter page! 

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A jumbled fore-edge index found in this law textbook at the University of Virginia Law Library. 

See this post on the Book Traces @ UVA Twitter Page! 

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A simple slight, in memoriam note for a J.C. Southey dated August 3, 1860 in this copy of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Traveller. This edition was published in London by David Bogue in 1855, but the gorgeous cover and binding looks like this was a custom work. 

See this post on BookTraces.org and submit your own finds! 

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Midterm time? This pile of student notes and translations was found in a copy of Juvenal’s D. Iunii Iuvenalis Satirae (1873 translation by John Delaware Lewis), and includes a withdrawal slip from the First State Bank of Holland, Michigan, and an ad for J.F. Sumerlin, Optician. 

See this post on BookTraces.org and submit your own finds! 

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“Celts furnished germ of Arthurian Legend. Born and bloomed in simplicity & poverty in Wales, went to France where it borrowed trappings of chivalry and Christianity - Brought back and shorn and made typical English epic” - in a copy of Wace’s Arthurian Chronicles, 1921. 

See this post on BookTraces.org and submit your own finds!

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“I think of you every day and you cannot tell how much I feel your absence — one of the calamities of this [illegible] world is that we do not sufficiently value our mercies till they are taken from us–” 

See this post on BookTraces.org and submit your own finds! 

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A clipping of Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s positive thinking poem “Speech” in an unidentified collection of her poems from 1919. Interestingly, the poem is called “Speak Truth” here.

See this post on BookTraces.org and submit your own finds!

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A letter from P.A.W. Henderson, editor of the suitably obscure Letters, Hitherto Unpublished, Written by Members of Sir Walter Scott's Family to Their Old Governess (1854) to a Scott fan - Bishop Francis Jayne. Henderson hopes the volume will “increase your affection for the bravest and kindliest of men.” 

See this post on BookTraces.org and submit your own finds! 

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Another submission from the prolific Book Traces finder Tara Key, this edition of Walachische Märchen by Arthur and Albert Schott (1845) contains intensive corrections by its previous owner as well as a slip recording its donation to Columbia from Dr. N.L. Britton, co-founder of the New York Botanical Garden.

See this post on BookTraces.org and submit your own finds! 

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An impressively ornate title page of the Lyra Sabbatica by Benjamin Gough (1865) accompanied by two ownership inscriptions: the rather upper-crust sounding Emily Stuart Montagu of Lund (?) Manor House, plus the simpler “Maurice” in lighter ink below. 

See this post on BookTraces.org and submit your own finds!

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A lovely sketch of a woman breastfeeding a baby in this copy of The Story of a Beautiful Duchess: Being an Account of the Life Times of Elizabeth Gunning, Duchess of Hamilton Argyll by Horace Bleakley (1907). 

See this post on BookTraces.org and submit your own finds! 

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Austin Warren has excerpted this bit of Richard Crashaw’s poem “Description of a Religious House and Condition of Life” in his dedication to Mrs. Irving Babbitt:

The self-remembering soul sweetly recovers Her kindred with the stars; not basely Hovers below: but meditates her immortal way Home to the original source of light and intellectual day

If I’m reading the names correctly, the dedication has some significance: Warren and Mr. Irving Babbit were both literary critics - and Warren appears to have been a student of Babbit’s at one time. 

See this post on BookTraces.org and submit your own finds!

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A pair of scissors threaten a lady in a bonnet in this copy of Letters from the United States, Cuba and Canada (1856) by Amelia Murray. Might they be depicting the cutting up of Murray herself, who was a defendant of slavery? 

See this post on the Book Traces Twitter page!