The Joy of Reading and Things you find in Secondhand Books

Elizabeth West writes in A Patch in the Forest:
I read everything: posters, timetables, soap packets, advertisements. Wherever there are two or three words gathered together I will read them.
I am just the same. I cannot contemplate going on a train journey or a holiday without plenty of reading matter. Going on cycling trips used to present me with problems as I wanted enough books to last me the whole trip but they also had to be lightweight. That is why my e-reader had become my best friend for trips.
At home I mostly read library books, and I buy books secondhand. Sadly, a lot of secondhand bookshops have closed, but there are a lot of „kringloopwinkels”, secondhand shops run by councils or organizations offering employment to people who would otherwise have difficulties finding work. English speaking visitors to The Netherlands please note: lots of English language books can be found there very cheaply.
As Elizabeth West point out, one of the joys of buying second hand books is finding things in them. She writes how, when reading In Search of Wales by H.V. Morton
… as I turned over page 91 (…) I was astonished to find a handwitten letter folded inside. „My own darlingest” I read. I hesitated for a moment and then, feeling rather sneaky, I read on. The letter dated 8th August 1942 was written by Eric stationed at 385 Battery, R.A.Orkney, to his wife Margaret, and recalled with tender details their marriage of the previous year and their honeymoon at Tenby. (…) So what happened? Was Eric killed in Action? Did Margaret die in the Blitz? Or did the arrival of this book on a street market stall have a more mundane explanation? We shall probably never know. And the very private love letter has ben replaced in Morton’s In Search of Wales, where it belongs.

In The Fat of the Land by John Seymour I found a note by Mary to Diana (written in January 2000) which was equally intriguing:
I want to thank you most sincerely for the time after Christmas, and do so; but it is difficult to know what to say more since I seem to have misunderstood at every point, and came as an uninvited and far from perfect guest, making assumptions and spreading germs. I can now only offer you and Harold a very sincere apology and hope in the long run it will not spoil what has been such a long and important friendship.(…) , but whatever you may think, it did not come from arrogance and selfishness, rather from presuming too much about boundaries.
Every time I come across it I reread it and ponder: what happened? Are they stil friends?