As much as I love the smell of new books, reading used books not only saves trees, but can be quite interesting when you find receipts, business cards, and markings left behind by previous owners.

In this instance, someone in my building must have cleaned out their bookshelves because there was a whole box to rummage through in the hallway. This particular book, Maximum City by Suketu Mehta, had quite a few things left in it including the card pictured below, a receipt, and a list of names and items that I imagine must be a Christmas list (photograph below).

What I find interesting here (that probably no one else will think is cool at all and that’s ok because I’m a dork and think stupid things are cool) are the names ‘Amy’ and ‘Matt’ next to each other because my name happens to be ‘Amy’ and my brother’s happens to be ‘Matt.’ So there’s another pair out there…

What I’ve decoded from this list is that 1. the person is a good gift giver and 2. the person is a gay man. The reason for 1. is that there are multiple items from Apple listed, along with several ‘wines’ and ‘kiehls,’ which are all quite tasteful gifts. This guy can totally shop for me any day.

The reason that I believe this person to be a gay man is that the longest list of items is under the name of ‘Marcos’ and includes something I can’t decipher, iTrip, guitar lessons, kiehls, and sharp (possibly something electronic?). That alone isn’t enough, obviously a girl could have written this list, but the handwriting is most definitely that of a man.

So you see, a used book is not necessarily just a used book. It’s a little piece of insight into someone else’s life. However, I never borrow books from my long time friend, Julie. Because she picks her nose. And sticks the boogers on whatever page she happens to be on. And that is something that I just don’t need to know.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Photography, iRead. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.