Occasionally there is added value
in purchasing a previously owned
aka second hand book online – like today,
for example, when I opened the packet
and withdrew a used copy of the Penguin
Poetry Library’s edition
of A. E. Housman’s Collected Poems,
with an introduction by John Sparrow,
Warden of All Souls College, Oxford,
and found a number of improvised bookmarks
between some of the pages: a sliver
of cardboard cut with scissors from a box
of muesli or granola, and placed between
‘When I was one-and-twenty’… and ‘There pass
the careless people…’; another piece
of cardboard from the same box, this time marking
‘Is my team ploughing That I was used to drive,
And hear the harness jingle, When I was
a man alive…’; between ‘Into my heart
an air that kills…’ and ‘In my own shire
if I was sad…’ copies of John Keats’
Sleep and Poetry, Wilfred Owen’s
Exposure, and Arthur Hugh Clough’s Say Not
The Struggle Naught Availeth cut out neatly
from the Daily Telegraph; lastly, between
‘Bring in this timeless grave to throw No
cypress sombre on the snow…’ and ‘Here,
the hangman stops his cart…’, a roughly torn
ad from the Stourbridge & West Midlands Express,
for a newly opened hotel and spa
in the hamlet of Fockbury, Housman’s
birthplace, purporting an unrivalled view
of Shropshire, and, quoting the famous poet,
‘those blue remembered hills’.
By David Selzer