I have been thinking about goats lately.
Not because I own one, or have developed any sudden interest in mountain climbing (both remain firmly outside my current life plan), but because goats seem to have mastered something most of us spend considerable energy trying to avoid: the ability to stand with complete confidence on the most inconvenient ledge imaginable. A rocky outcrop that any sensible creature would look at and quietly back away from. The goat simply plants itself, looks out at the view, and decides that this is precisely where it is supposed to be.
I find this admirable. I also find it uncomfortably familiar.
My current ledge, and I want to be honest with you about how specific this ledge is and how clearly I can see from up here, is bookshop stamps.
Yes. Bookshop stamps. I'll give you a moment.
You know the ones. Not library stamps, those I have a complicated affection for, all those dates and borrower numbers, the whole quiet bureaucracy of a book being loved by strangers in sequence. I mean the secondhand bookshop stamp. Pressed into the title page in faded ink, announcing that at some point in this book's life it passed through a particular shop on a particular street in a particular town. Practical, I understand. A form of branding. A tradition that goes back further than most of us have been buying books. I understand all of this and I remain, despite my best efforts, slightly bothered by it.
As someone who runs a secondhand bookshop, I am aware this is a somewhat awkward opinion to hold. It's a bit like a baker admitting they have reservations about icing. Professionally inconvenient. Possibly a cry for help. I've turned it over many times, looking for the angle at which it starts to make sense, and I keep arriving at the same place.
Secondhand books already come with all the marks they need.
Give me the child's wobbly signature on the front page. Give me the faded bookmark that has quietly waited twenty years for someone to return. Give me the shopping list tucked into chapter twelve, the bus ticket pressed between the pages, the coffee stain from a rainy Tuesday in 1998. Give me the handwritten note that simply says:Â you have to read chapter seven.
Those things make me stop. They remind me that a secondhand book is not just a story someone read. It is a small record of a life being lived around it. A time capsule that didn't know it was being filled.
At The Story Station we are only ever temporary custodians. These books belonged to someone before us, and if we are lucky, they will belong to someone after us too, carrying forward whatever small trace we left behind, without our name pressed into the title page to claim credit for the passing. Not because we want you to forget where you found them, but because I would far rather the next person who opens this book discovers your plane ticket, your pencilled thought in the margin, your coffee stain, than my stamp.
That is a better story.
Am I standing on a very strange little goat-sized ledge? Quite possibly. But I'd love to know if bookshop stamps bother you too. Write to me.
PS: I once found a birthday card tucked inside a copy of a rather serious novel about mortality. It said "Happy 40th! Don't be dramatic." The timing, I felt, was impeccable.