I love used book stores. What can be better than rooms full of weird, cheap books? Every once in a while, you even get a book with a personal history.

I was vacationing in Maine years ago, and ended up at a used book sale in a church. I bought the second and third books in the Griffin & Sabine trilogy by Nick Bantock. The books are about Griffin, an artist living a lonely life in London and running his own greeting card company, and Sabine, a woman living on one of the Soloman Islands- also an artist. They share a strange mental bond, and communicate with postcards and letters. The books are fancy- they consist of the actual correspondence. You can take letters out of envelopes and such.

Inscribed in the front of the second book in red rollerball pen was the following note:

Christmas ‘93
My Dearest “Sabine,”

I give this book with the full awareness that possibly one similar might be winging its way westward. Nonetheless, its light is still treasured. But are you real or is it just an illusion.

With deepest devotion,
“Griffin”

And in the front of the third one in the same handwriting, this time in red marker:

Rebecca,

The final chapter . . . or is it? A mirror held to our collective faces? Reflections? Images? The Trilogy Ends.

Merry Christmas.

The Griffinesque One,
Rick

I love those inscriptions, though they never fail to make me a little sad. Assuming that they’re genuine, I can’t help but think about the man that wrote them and the woman he loved. More than anything else, I wonder what happened to them- why are these books being sold in a church instead of sitting happily on Rebecca’s bookshelf?

Maybe they had a messy breakup, and Rebecca donated the books to the sale as a way of showing how little she cared for her memories of Rick. Maybe he died, and they were too painful a reminder. Maybe she died. Maybe Rick and Rebecca are living a pleasant life together right now, but they’ve left behind the sentimentality that made them hold on to old gifts.

I don’t like the possibilities that involve their love fading, or never really existing in the first place. I like to think that love lasts forever, that people never change and grow apart- but it isn’t true. These books are testament to that. It makes me love them.