Reading the well-read book travelling from Vancouver 1995 to Subryanville 2021

 Wake up at 330am or so, tossing turning and then decide let me put on light and pick up the book to start reading. New habit now as the disrupted sleep - get up, empty bladder, put on light, pick up book and read and not worry about sleep while waiting for the sun to rise.

I can't remember where I got the book - either from a Groundings or from the discard table at the National Library. Or somewhere else where well read books go before they hit the rubbish bin.

One morning a piece of paper falls out of the book. I am distracted from the poems and prose from Ghana by the three words , scribbled on a paper which was once white. Something about Dreams, Vision the other V - Violence? ..  

The book has some markings inside - one of the joys of reading books which others have scribbled in is the connection with the unknown person who might think the same phrase is worthy of note that you would have noted if I could read with a pen. I can't read with a pen though.

The book has this speckled cover. I collected pre-Covid so I did not sanitise but I imagined the hands passed through, the places left, the toilet tank covers while toilet paper was being used.. while it was in the Carnegie Branch Library in Vancover, BC, Canada until it was discarded on Sept 10 1995 and then on its way to my bed in the morning hours before the sun rises.

 

Windu shared "Rarely here but I know that Carnegie library well. It serves in the poorest urban postal code in Canada. A library you would like. It's built into a whole inner city community centre. gym, low cost nutritious food, old men playing an eternal game of mah jhong, a library people can walk into without fear of being driven out because your clothes tattered. self help books made by for and about community right beside the books the system calls authoritative and those books get kept close for people to study how they been studied and respond armed with information. In 1995, a memory backed by a little search.... Todd, Douglas. "Public Libraries Under Siege." Vancouver Sun, 20 May 1995, sec. D, p.11."

The book looses up as I read it so holding it to read means holding it together.  The paper in the book with the Dreams, Visions and Viol.. markings is held with the book too, I think now the book is not only the pages and the text of the author and editor, but the scribbling and memory of the eyes and hands of the readers. 

So I keep everything intact and I hope to pass it on intact to another reader who appreaciates well read books and understands the importance of random papers stuck inside books falling apart.