I love the stories I find buried in the pages of an old book.
My bookshelves are groaning ever since I finally got my license at the young old age of 30. It felt surreal to finally hold that ticket to the world, a newfound freedom to roam beyond the confines of my podunk outpost in central North Carolina.
The first two stops I made on that inaugural solo journey were obvious: Walmart, then Goodwill.
Since then, I’ve made it a point to visit Goodwill every week or two to browse what my neighbors decided to cast aside in the hope of giving new life to old junk (and to get a tiny tax write-off next spring).
Glassware is affordable, baskets are plentiful, and cheap electronics are tempting. “Wow, nice radio! What a shame the power cord was a cat’s chew toy when Nixon was in office. But for eight bucks…” For all the goodies they’ve got, though, it’s the books that keep me coming back.
Each Goodwill hosts an ever-rotating selection of tawdry romance, sanctimonious preachers, airport paperbacks, and nicotine-blotched cookbooks with titles like “Fat: The Dame’s Worst Enemy!”
And they’re almost always old. Jackpot.
When I was about 14 years old, my mom gave me a set of colored pencils she’d had as a teenager. It wasn’t a time-honored hand-me-down sort of deal—I had a school project due and we didn’t have any other colored pencils in the house. Just take ’em, Dennis, jeez.
Later that night, I caught myself staring at the pencils longer than I’d expected. All twelve of them were lightly sharpened, bound together by a yellowing cardboard wrap nestled inside of a dingy plastic bag.
What had those pencils seen and heard over the years? Y’know, the typical things every normal teenager wonders.
That pack of pencils kickstarted a low-simmer interest in the age of things. Any things. Pencils, keychains, coasters, Christmas ornaments, a petrified box of Rice-a-Roni excavated from the pantry by a team of experts. How old is this? What has it seen? What stories could it tell?
It’s the age of a used book that keeps me hooked on browsing, telling a backstory that’s sometimes more compelling to me than the words buried within. And I’ve stumbled upon some fantastic finds over the past few years.
The King of Torts — John Grisham
I picked up a copy of Michael Crichton’s Airframe on a run to the high school library my freshman year and it captivated me. I’d always been interested in airplane crash investigations—again, I’m weird—and that book was the perfect combination of mystery, thrill, and geeky airplane details.
Once I’d devoured that book, I moved on to my mom’s bookshelf and picked up a dusty old paperback copy of John Grisham’s The Chamber. Not only did it change my mind on the death penalty, but it solidified my interest in legal and political thrillers.
I was pumped when I walked into Goodwill last June and spotted a pristine copy of John Grisham’s The King of Torts sitting on the shelf. It’s one of the books that’d been on my wishlist forever, and at $2.49 I didn’t even bother flipping the pages to see if there was a spider or someone’s old taco hiding inside.
The perpetual calendar was the enduring joy of that trip, but a makeshift bookmark neatly tucked between pages 188 and 189 made my day.
Raymond Bailey took a Delta flight out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the afternoon of September 13, 2005, flying into Atlanta like any proper southerner should do at least a dozen times in their life. Mr. Bailey—or one of his travel companions—brought The King of Torts along for that midday hop, tucking their boarding pass in the middle of Chapter 20 and apparently never looking back.
The boarding pass sat in the book for 17 years until I snatched it off the shelf that afternoon and it fell into my hands. As an airplane geek, I still have most of the boarding passes I saved from my flights back and forth on college breaks. Finding an even older boarding pass felt like holding a tiny, insignificant piece of aviation history in my hands.
I often think about that boarding pass. Is the guy who took that flight a generation ago still alive? What was he doing in Milwaukee? Did he not like the book? I can’t help but feel a little bit of pity, too—I’m not sure they served Biscoff on Delta flights back then. What a rough world it must’ve been.
On The Road — Jack Kerouac
Plenty of friends recommended On The Road to me given my love of driving around and wistful hope of travelling one day.
This threadbare copy of Jack Kerouac’s classic fell into my hands at McKay’s Used Books back in the spring of 2023. Again—I saw the old spine on the shelf and couldn’t help myself.
It was worth the couple of bucks to peek inside and find this old Greyhound ticket from August 18, 1973.
Reading On The Road while on the road is a very liberal arts thing to do. Given the date, there’s a decent chance the person who owned this book last was on their way to Wittenberg University for the start of fall semester.
The Code of the City of Greenville, N.C. 1957
I’m sure whoever donated their copy of The Code of the City of Greenville North Carolina 1957 to Goodwill last year couldn’t imagine who in their right mind would actually buy it.
Anyway, I snatched it up and found two interesting tidbits inside. The only sign anyone actually used the book was a dry cleaning ticket tucked into Section 19 as a makeshift bookmark.
Someone used a red pen to highlight Section 19-5 covering the extremely important issue of minors in poolrooms.
“It shall be unlawful for any person owning or operating a pocket billiard room in the city to allow or permit any person under sixteen years of age to loiter in such pocket billiard room or play pocket billiards unless accompanied by his parent or guardian.”
They underlined the section name and bracketed that clunky sentence twice on either side. Whoever owned this book back in 1958 really didn’t want minors in poolrooms.
The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll: First Edition
This was just a sweet note I found at the beginning of a Lewis Carroll anthology I found in Goodwill one morning. (I’ve always meant to read Alice in Wonderland.)
I hope Ted knew and appreciated how much grandma and granddaddy loved him.
