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Book Traces catalogs interesting additions by readers of historical texts. (Photo illustration by Ryan Rich)
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Extensive marginal notes by Jane Chapman Slaughter to her late lover in a copy of "Poems and Ballads" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Image courtesy Book Traces)
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A flower pinned to the dedication page of a memorial volume of "The Changed Cross and Other Religious Poems" (Image courtesy Book Traces)
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The cover of a Book Traces collection features paper doll clothes found in a copy of “The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott.”
Haphazard highlights, scrap paper bookmarks and schoolboy scribbles are often passed off as mere library book litter, but they can offer peeks into the past.
Andrew Stauffer, then the University of Virginia’s English department chair, was teaching his 19th-century British poetry course in fall 2009 when a sharp-eyed student made an enormous discovery in the Alderman Library shelves: a grieving mother’s poem penciled into the pages of a Felicia Hemans poetry collection.
Andrew Stauffer (Photo courtesy Andrew Stauffer)
At the time, public and university libraries had already begun to rapidly digitize their catalogs, but Stauffer and UVA librarian Kristin Jensen noticed that 19th-century titles lacking rare book status were slipping through the circulation cracks. Determined to design a digital solution, in 2014 they launched Book Traces, a submission-based archive of uniquely annotated 19th- and early-20th-century library books.
Stauffer likens each scrawled marginalia discovery to the thrill of spotting a rare animal in the wild. One-way arguments in religious texts, a hand-drawn artillery map in a Civil War-era history book, arsenic-contaminated fabric glued into a medical journal, locks of hair and flowers pressed into flyleaves, and a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poetry book filled with youthful romance annotations are just a handful of the 3,280 notable submissions. The site has around 100 contributors worldwide, with most coming from universities, many of them in Virginia.
While each Book Traces entry is relatively bite-sized, Stauffer’s book about the project, published in 2021, offers more tantalizing tidbits. “I wanted to give more focus to the personal place books had in people’s lives during that century, to the personal ways they were using them,” Stauffer says. “[Publishing a book] was a chance to connect the web project to conversations about the future of the physical library and why these individual stories matter, why print collections matter.”
Browsers today can take smartphones to the library stacks and satisfyingly hit the site’s big, green “Submit a Book” button. “I need an army to make these discoveries. There are millions of these books out there in the world,” Stauffer says. “If we distribute the workload — like a library flash mob — then we can keep building a real record.”
