I’ve collected vintage books since childhood, and you may remember a post from last year, For the Love of Old Books, about that collection.

Lately, given several recent “finds”, I’ve been thinking about the untold stories bookplates and inscriptions in old, often long out-of-print books, tell.

Earlier this month, I visited a flea market near our lake house in rural Eastern Ontario, Canada. The book section yielded some unexpected and surprising gems.

If you’ve read The Teacher Evacuees, my first book as Rose Warner and a WW2 British home front story, you know that it (and the upcoming series) are set in North Norfolk, England, a special place from happy family holidays when English Rose was small.

So what did I find at that flea market?

Several vintage books about Norfolk life and history.

One, Chapters on the East Anglian Coast: Part II The Dialect and Provincialisms was published in 1866 and is now the oldest book in my collection.

For the sum of $1.00 Canadian (circa 50 pence UK), I’m the proud owner of a book that once, according to its engraved bookplate (by the British etcher and painter Cornelius Jansen Walter Winter, 1817-1891), belonged to The Reverend Charles Robertson Manning, M.A. of Diss Rectory Norfolk in 1883.

Manning, as listed on several online genealogy sites, was born in Diss in 1825 and died there around 1899.

He and his wife, Emilia Upwood, married on 14 February 1855—by a curious coincidence exactly one hundred and seventy-one years to the day on which I “found” his book.

The bookplate, showing his name, coat of arms and home is also held by the Norfolk Museums collection.

How did that book come from Diss, Norfolk to rural Canada? I’ll never know but it’s interesting to imagine the journey!

Also this month, at another local thrift store (charity shop), again for circa $1.00 Canadian, I got a 1941 edition of Sunset Gun, a poetry collection by American writer and literary critic Dorothy Parker (1893-1967).

My romance author heart thrilled at the inscription, remembering time spent in San Francisco “the week of June 18, 1943 beginning our eighth month of heaven, Darling.”

From “Mac” to “my Iggie”, the book was a birthday gift and signed “I love you.”

I’ll never know who “Mac” and “Iggie” were, or why an undoubtedly once-treasured present came to be discarded, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wonder about their love story.

As I add these books to my collection, I’m rescuing and curating memories as well as everyday history.

And who knows, they might one day spark new stories of my own.