When my father downsized from his house into a retirement center, he sent my brother and me a list of books, and from afar, we chose which ones we wanted.
Years have passed, and I hardly remember what I picked out, except that I had an eye for old books. The other day I came across an especially old one, dated 1867. I know it came from my childhood home due to the bright orange bookmark tucked inside, Dad’s code for “Claire.”
Old books can be like treasure hunts. In The Psalms of David In Metre I was captivated by the subtitle: With Annotations explaining the Sense, and Animating the Devotion, By John Brown, late minister of the Gospel at Haddington. This John Brown was an Anglican minister who lived from 1722 to 1787. It turns out he was a self-made man, a shepherd in Scotland who taught himself to read Greek, Latin and Hebrew. In the songbook in my possession, each Psalm of David begins with Brown’s notes about content and meaning.
But there’s more. Tucked in the pages was also a postcard from 1911 advertising the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the First Presbyterian Church of Cleveland, founded in 1811. 
In the heat of a big move, or at the end of a parent’s life, we might find ourselves in a hurry to get things squared away, to shuttle boxes off to the donation center without a second glance, oblivious to the treasures inside. Moral of the story: leaf through those books, including the ones you hang onto. You just never can tell what you’ll find inside.