A Note on Page Nine, for Whoever Comes Next

The drawer of my desk holds a stack of pale yellow slips, cut by hand because the bought ones are too wide for a small book. I write one line on each and tuck it where the story turns, usually around page nine, by which time the reader has decided whether to continue.

I never write a summary. A summary is a closed door with the room described on it. What I write is closer to directions: the part where the father comes back, the chapter with the flood, the page where the dog is fine, do not worry.

What belongs in a margin

Rules I keep for myself: one sentence, my own words, no spoilers, no signature. If I signed them, the child would read the note as a message to them, and it is not. It is a message from the book.

Last term a girl in Year Five borrowed the same title three times and returned it unfinished. I said nothing. On the fourth loan I left a slip: skip to page forty, the grandmother is there. She came back with the book finished and the note in her pencil case, folded twice.

A note is a hand on the shoulder, not a lesson.

Now they leave notes for me. A boy wrote on the back of one of mine, in pencil, that page forty was the best. I have not removed it. It sits in the book for the next reader, two handwritings in a small space, neither of them signed.

The ones nobody finds

Some slips are never found. They go out with a book, fall behind a shelf, get thrown away with a sandwich wrapper. I keep a list in the back of an exercise book of titles that never came back, eleven so far this year, and I do not write it as a charge against anyone.

I do not count missing books as theft. I count them as books still being read somewhere.

On Friday I cut a new stack and write the first lines that come. The drawer smells of paper and a little of the glue on my fingers. There are worse ways to spend an afternoon than writing sentences for people you will never meet.