Photo: Jeremie Souteyrat for the New York Times.
Steve Mills shows his copy of The Naughtiest Girl Again, by Enid Blyton, with marginalia by a child.
In a fun story from the New York Times, Jonathan Wolfe writes about a children’s-book collector in England who was surprised to discover who did the childish drawings inside an acquisition. It reminded me of some favorite childhood books — and how I loved to draw pictures of girls with pointy noses on any piece of paper I could find.
“In retirement,” writes Wolfe, “Steve Mills began collecting secondhand books that he had read as a child. It was an effort to reawaken lost memories. …
“He was at home in Hockley, east of London, flipping through titles from a recent book haul from a charity shop. Inside the pages of an early hardcover edition of The Naughtiest Girl Again, by the English author Enid Blyton, he found a girl’s handwritten notes from more than 50 years earlier. It took a few moments for Mr. Mills to grasp who the writer was: his wife, Karen.
“At first, Mr. Mills, a 67-year-old former civil servant, simply recognized an address in the town where his wife had grown up, written in a child’s handwriting. He brought the book to Ms. Mills, and said, ‘Oh look, they used to live in the village you came from,’ Mr. Mills recalled.
“The address had been her childhood home, though it was spelled wrong. Ms. Mills couldn’t believe it. …
“ ‘I thought at first that it was him being a silly bugger,’ she said. ‘I actually said to him, “Are you trying to misspell our first address?” But I looked at it again, and I thought, “Oh my word, this is written by my brother and me when we were 9 and 10,” ‘ she said. … There were timetables she had carefully recorded, pages she had folded to save her place and a sketch of little Karen, freckles dotting her face. …
“[Ms. Mills] grew up in Staffordshire, about 170 miles northwest of Hockley. Her parents, Brenda and David Larden, both 87, told their daughter that they must have donated the book to a church or school drive around 1975, when they moved. …
“ ‘For 50 years,’ Ms. Mills said, the book had ‘gone around the country, doing I don’t know what — entertaining children — and then it came back to us.’ …
“But his discoveries weren’t over. A few days after finding his wife’s name in The Naughtiest Girl Again, Mr. Mills suddenly realized that there were other titles in the haul that he hadn’t looked at. Could some of those, too, have been from his wife’s childhood home?
“ ‘I picked up another couple of books and, lo and behold, there was my wife’s name,’ he said.
“He found doodles by Ms. Mills and her brother Mark on two other Enid Blyton books, The Adventures of Pip and The Famous Five: Five on a Treasure Island. The latter was one of Mr. Mills’s favorite books as a boy.
“The find was particularly meaningful for him, he said, because Ms. Blyton’s stories reminded him of boyhood adventures with his mother in Cornwall, on the English coast. …
“In the back of one of the three books, he said, his wife had written, ‘I have got 12 of Enid BLYTONS Books.’
“ ‘So that leaves me with another nine to try and find now,’ he said.”
More at the Times, here. What did you draw in your books — or hide inside? Four-leaf clovers?
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
I love this story!
I like to imagine this happening to me!
Astonishing turn of events. Seems rather fated to occur, hard to explain otherwise.
What a strange story! Fun, but odd.
At first, I assumed the books circulated in the same region for years. I know that happens on smaller islands than the UK. But the idea that they had been far afield is indeed odd.