Most marginalia devalues a used book, which is the first thing you learn cataloging, and most days I flip past it without much thought the same way you’d note a water stain or a broken spine, a defect to be priced around. But I keep a small drawer behind the register, unofficial, unlabeled, for the handful of annotated copies I’ve come across in twelve years that I genuinely could not bring myself to sell at the discount their condition would technically justify, because the handwriting in them was doing something I didn’t want to lose.

There’s a copy of Mrs. Dalloway with a stranger’s pencil notes running the length of the margin, mostly single words, “yes” and “true” and once, next to the party scene near the end, just “still doing this at 40, apparently,” undated, unsigned, and I have wondered for years what that reader’s actual life looked like at the moment they wrote it. There’s a paperback of The Plague, the Stuart Gilbert translation, with underlining so consistent and so precisely matched to the passages about ordinary decency under catastrophe that I genuinely believe whoever owned it was reading during a specific crisis of their own, though there’s no way to know which one.

And there’s the one I think about most, a battered copy of a poetry collection with a name and a date inscribed on the flyleaf, a gift inscription, “for the worst year, love always,” and then nothing else marked in the whole book, not a single other pencil stroke, as though the book itself had done its job just by arriving and being held.

I don’t think this is sentimentality exactly, or not only that. Cataloging teaches you to read a book as an object with a specific, traceable history, an edition, a printing, a provenance if you’re lucky enough to have one, and marginalia is provenance of the most intimate kind available, a record of one specific reading rather than the abstract fact that the book exists. Most of it is genuinely just noise, doodles, grocery lists on the inside cover, a phone number with no name attached. But often enough to keep me looking, it’s a stranger’s actual mind meeting a text in real time, left behind by accident for someone like me to find decades later.

I don’t sell the drawer copies. I’m not sure what I’m keeping them for, exactly, since I can’t return them to whoever wrote in them and I’m not going to auction off a stranger’s private reaction to Virginia Woolf. I think I just like knowing the drawer is there.