Do you know what I love? Flyleaf inscriptions and dedications, whether they're part of the book, or scrawled by an owner. I have some wonderful second hand books with these snippets of people's lives in them. I always wonder who these people were, and why they chose that particular book, and whether they were a friend or a lover or family. What's the story?
One of my new year's resolutions is to write a little story in every book I buy. The details, things like "It's January 2010, and you bought this book from Dear Reader in Grey Lynn, and you read it in the hot, hot sun after Christmas, when it wasn't your turn to drive. It made you cry but you hid behind your sunglasses because otherwise the boys you were driving with wouldn't have known what to do, and you ate nectarines and drank too much beer that week." Or whatever. I got the idea from this blog. Look at this book her Dad gave her when she was little!
There are also some lovely dedications here, in Jasmine Raznahan's work The Space Between Things.
