"I love used book stores, but
there is always that forlorn melancholy
Of knowing that one day your copies
of Arabia Deserta, Stock Photographs: The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo, and
The Voyage of the Beagle,
will one day be jumbled amongst
someone else's cook books, Judy Blume,
and, God forbid, self help literature.

So I write notes in the margins.
I hide pictures between pages.

If I'm feeling magnanimous, I'll tuck a dollar near the good part of the story.

Sometimes I circle words leaving secret messages.

I see these things as little whispers
to the people of the future.
I want to let them know that
that these books too once had other lives."

Raul Gutierrez