Marginalia

Beatrix collects marginalia, which is a slightly embarrassing thing to say at a party.

She does not collect books. She has, on several occasions, bought a book she has no interest in and will never read because the person at the till let her look inside first, and she has left behind first editions because they were clean.

What she is after is the writing in the margins. Arguments with the author. Corrections. Shopping lists. A pressed leaf and the word no.

She has about eleven hundred.

The rules of the hobby

You buy blind, mostly. Charity shops, house clearances, the boxes under the table at book fairs that the dealer has not sorted.

The good stuff is in unfashionable books. Nobody writes in a first edition; they write in the paperback they actually read on a train.

Ninety-five per cent of it is boring, which is the point. The whole pleasure is in the four per cent that is interesting and the one per cent that is extraordinary, and you cannot get to the one per cent without the ninety-five.

JLM

The handwriting first turned up in 2016, in a paperback of a naval history bought in Nantwich for forty pence.

It is a small upright hand in hard pencil, and it argues.

Not politely. On page ninety-one of the naval history, next to a paragraph about a supply decision, it says: He is guessing. He has not read Corbett. Nobody has read Corbett.

Beatrix laughed out loud in the shop.

The book was signed on the flyleaf with initials — JLM — and a date, 1974.

The second one

Eighteen months later, in Shrewsbury, in a box of gardening books, a paperback on soil chemistry.

Same hand. Same pencil. Same initials, 1979.

On the inside back cover, in full: This is the fourth book I have bought on this subject and the first that admits what is not known. Recommend to A.

What Beatrix has now

Forty-one books in that hand, acquired between 2016 and this year, from eleven different sources across the north-west and Welsh borders.

Dates from 1968 to 2004.

The subjects are all over the place: naval history, soil, three books on canal engineering, a run of eleven on the history of the wool trade, two field guides, and — this is the one that changed things — a 1988 paperback about how to write a will.

The picture that builds

Beatrix has never tried to identify JLM and would like that clearly stated, because everyone assumes she has.

She has not. She has thought about it and decided against it, for reasons she finds difficult to articulate but which come down to this: the pleasure is the reading, and a name would end it.

What she has instead is forty-one books' worth of a person, in order, over thirty-six years.

JLM is impatient in 1968 and considerably less impatient by 1995.

JLM refers to "A" in the margins of eleven books between 1974 and 1991 and then never again.

JLM stops arguing with authors somewhere around 2000 and starts, instead, agreeing with them, which Beatrix found unaccountably upsetting the week she noticed it.

The last book, 2004, is a paperback about the Mersey. There is one note in it, on the last page, and it says: Better than I expected. Give to the girl next door, she likes this sort of thing.

The forty-second

She found it in March, in a house clearance box in Chester, and it is a novel, which is the first novel in the set.

The hand is shakier. The date on the flyleaf is 2009.

And on page four, in the margin, next to nothing in particular, it says:

B — if you are reading this you have found another one. Well done. This is number forty-two.

Beatrix put the book down.

She has read that sentence perhaps five hundred times since March and she is no closer.

The initials on the flyleaf are JLM. The novel was published in 2007. She bought it in Chester, sixty miles from Nantwich, in a box that a dealer had not opened, and there is no possible mechanism by which any of this is anything other than a coincidence of initials.

B is not a rare letter.

What she has done since

She has bought a great deal more than usual. About four hundred books since March, which is a year's worth in eight months, and her flat is a problem.

She is looking for forty-three.

She is aware of every reason why there will not be one.