The Story of Things

Another good quote that will make you think comes on page 78 of Shaun Bythell’s The Diary of a Bookseller. He sells a copy of Decameron to a young Italian woman, and he explains how he came to have this two-volume set from 1679 in his shop.

He picked it up when he went to clear out the books from a woman’s house after she died. He’s talking to a person at the flat and she tells him a little about the woman’s story. She was the daughter of an Italian father and a Scottish mother who once upon a time ran a very busy cafe on the ground floor of the building.

He tries to mentally construct the story of how this book ended up in the woman’s flat since it doesn’t fit with the rest of the contents of her bookshelf.

The optimism of that young Italian man, with his Scottish wife, his thriving business and his young daughter, the courage it took him to move to another country, learn a new language and start a business and a new life could never have anticipated the sad end that fate dealt to his dream. I am quite sure that the two-volume Decameron would have been among the few possessions he brought with him from Italy, and I wonder how long it might have been passed down through his family, only to end that inheritance here in a damp flat in New Cumnock with nobody to pass it on to. But now it will have a new life in the hands of the young woman who bought it today, and who knows what the next few hundred years will have in store for it.

I love that idea of our possessions sometimes having stories. Or the thought that things in my house could end up hundreds of years later in someone else’s hands, making them happy. Like the wooden duck I keep on my bedside table, Lachlan, could one day end up on the shelf of a random person who makes up a story of how this little wooden duck moved through the world to end up in their home.