My copy T.S. Eliot Collected Poems 1909-1935 was reprinted by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. in  New York, 1936. The original publication was by Faber in London of the same year. In this copy the title page has a stamp from Milton Academy library in blue ink. After some research, I found that Milton is a k-12 private school in Massachusetts that’s been around for over a hundred years. The book must have belonged to that library before it was either donated, or bought by the used bookstore I purchased it from. This collection contains all of Eliot’s work between the years 1909-1935. It is an old hard cover, but I’m unsure of its exact age. The pages are yellowed, the binding is worn, and unlike newer editions of Eliot’s collected poems, it lacks footnotes. However, someone has gone through and lightly marked up with pencil the more studied works, like The Waste Land, “The Hollowmen”, and “The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. The annotations are in meticulously small and written a quite beautiful and delicate handwriting that leads me to believe that whoever wrote in this book was once a female student or professor at Milton Academy.

My first encounter with Eliot was through The Waste Land. I had the Norton critical edition, which provides all of Eliot’s original footnotes and then some. I can only imagine the time and effort that this person went through to understand all the obscure references and to translate passages that were in a different language. Her notes are extensive, but there are a lot of stanzas that are made clearer by the Norton edition.

Although I write in almost every book I own – underlining, circling words I don’t understand, and making comments – I would never dream of touching my pen to these pages. I have come to the minor epiphany that I don’t write in any books that I purchase used; there is something sacred about these annotations, and any marks made by me would be disfiguring the true heritage of the book. The most annotated poem in this collection “The Hollow Men” suggesting to me that whoever the book belonged to at Milton might have had to write a paper on it. I wonder how it made its way to my favorite book store?

I picked if off the shelf on a rainy cold day sometime in mid-November of last year in the Bruised Apple book store in Peekskill. The clerk who is usually there is an older gentleman with a kind smile and a receding hairline reminiscent of Prufrock. I once heard him read poetry at an open mic several years back. He had brought in his poem to the open mic reading in a paper bag and while he read dramatically dropped the pages to the ground as he flew through his verses. He started off saying, “No one wants to be a poet – it’s like being an aristocrat during the revolution.” I still don’t know if I agree with him, but I’ll never forget the surprise I felt in finding that the little old man behind the counter of my favorite bookstore had so much to say. It was a lot like finding this book. Forgive the cliché, but I had discovered something much more in its pages than the cover could ever reveal

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