Please write here: your best book inscriptions

There’s little better than a good secondhand bookshop, and once within its hallowed walls, there’s little that is more fun than stumbling across a great old inscription. So thanks to MobyLives for alerting me to this – a possible first edition of Persuasion from 1818, awarded in May 1900 as a school prize to one Lillian M Flood, whose descendants are now being traced by an enterprising high-school teacher.

Flood – no relation, as far as I’m aware (although wouldn’t that be great) – was a student at Ayer High School in Massachusetts. The copy of Persuasion was found in a box of “junk” in a garage by one Alice B Bantle of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, the Boston Globe reports, with the curly-lettered inscription: “Prize speaking, Ayer High School, May 17 1900, First prize, Lillian M Flood”.

“Even though Persuasion is in very bad shape,” Bantle wrote in a letter to the English department at Ayer High School, “it might be of interest to someone in your English Department, or traced back to its original family”. Teacher Eleanor Capasso has taken on the challenge and is looking for Flood’s descendants.

This lovely quest puts me in mind of my own serendipitous book inscription story. Back in 2010, I was writing a series of blogs exploring the classics of fantasy and I’d chosen Tim Powers’s (amazing) The Anubis Gates. I picked up a secondhand copy - old fantasy covers are just the best.

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I opened my blog with the details of the inscription I’d found inside my copy: “To Dad. Happy Saturnalia/Birthday/New Year etc. This book is everything it’s cracked up to be. Have a good escape from reality! Love, Nigel. Dec 1990.”

That Nigel – a Nigel Goldenfeld – later stumbled across the blog when looking for a Powers quote and got in touch. “I nearly fell off my chair when I read the opening,” he emailed. “I literally had to read it twice to make sure that I was not hallucinating, then called in my family to show them, then Skyped my Mum over in England (Chorleywood).”

My copy had been Nigel’s late father’s, given away either when his father moved house or passed away. We were both very excited. Nigel (whom I’d written in the blog that I’d “fallen for”, gently let me down by telling me his “dance-card [was] already full”) and then contacted the author Tim Powers about the coincidence. Powers agreed that it was like a scene in The Anubis Gates – in which our academic hero Brendan Doyle finds a line written in pig Latin on a 17th-century manuscript (“Hi Brendan, can you dig it?”) in his own writing. He likened it to the story of how Wizard of Oz actor Frank Morgan found that the secondhand coat he wore in the Kansas scenes had belonged to Oz author L Frank Baum.

Anyway, Nigel was keen to get the book back, but due to a combination of children being born, moving to Norway, and general disorganisation (on my part), we’ve yet to effect a meeting.

I’m going to the post office this week to send it to America, though – better late than never. But while I continue to hope that the Floods of Massachusetts are distant relations of the Floods of Down Patrick, and while I plan a series of secondhand bookshop trips on my return to the UK this summer, regale me with your own stories about favourite book inscriptions.