The springing of the year has brought many exciting updates from our Okay Donkey staff and contributors, including recently published work, a site redesign in the works 👀, and our Best New Poets nominees! Fiction reader Kier Davison also writes to us about the intimacy inherent in the inscriptions inside of secondhand books.

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A big congratulations to Okay Donkey’s Best New Poets nominees:

by Kier Davison, Fiction Reader

A year or two ago, when reading a secondhand book for a university class, I found myself
intently following the words of not the author, but the book’s previous owner. This owner, a former student from some point within the past 20 years, perhaps studied under the very same professor. They annotated the book throughout with their own impressions, slices of knowledge, and ruminations. Upon finishing, I felt quite sure that I knew this stranger, just from their own impressions of the text. Reading is a very intimate thing, as far as I'm concerned.

Equally interesting are the inscriptions you'll find on the title pages of a book. Typically, it’s because the book was once a gift, and so if you’ve found said book lingering somewhere in a secondhand shop, you might deduce how well this gift was received.

On a bookshelf in my mother’s house, I found this inscription inside a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness: “For K, with whom I think I would have had interesting conversations – sorry not to have met you.”

Sometimes they're less cryptic and more amusing, such as this one: “I hope you will take this book with several mounds of salt.”

Book inscriptions tell the story of a relationship: an inside joke, an attempt at flirting, a
burgeoning friendship, a misinterpretation of who the receiver is, or perhaps a parting note.

My favorite inscription that I've come across is within a now-obscure academic book, written from the author, a professor, to their Ph.D. student: “For Charlotte, who will know how to read between the lines of this book. Oct. 1989.”

Next time you get a secondhand book, take a glance at the inscriptions. Who knows what you might discover between the lines?

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