Bought a 1930s Swedish atlas at a flea market for 40 kronor and now I can't cut it

It's been on the studio table for nine days. I bought it for the endpapers, which are this faded marbled thing in dull green, exactly the colour I've been chasing. Forty kronor, Haga flea market, the seller didn't even look up from his phone.

But it's got someone's pencil notes in the margins. Place names, small careful handwriting, someone who clearly used it. Södertälje underlined twice. I don't know why twice.

So it sits there. My whole practice is tearing up old paper, that's the entire point, and I've been walking past it for over a week. I know I'll cut it eventually. It's a mass-printed atlas, not a national treasure. But not today, apparently.

Anyone else get stuck like this, or is it just me being sentimental about a 40-kronor book.

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Dani Okafor·1h

Ok but the double underline on Södertälje is going to live in my head rent free now. Someone underlined it twice, that's not a casual mark, that's a person with a reason.

Honestly I'd cut it. The notes don't disappear when the endpapers come out, they just go somewhere else, and if you're careful you can lift the marbled sheet and keep the rest of the atlas intact on a shelf. Best of both. But I get the nine days. I've had a stack of old ledger paper on my desk since March that I keep not touching because the handwriting's too good.

Also forty kronor for marbled endpapers you've been chasing is a stupid good deal, so at least the guilt is cheap.

Elin HolmOP·44m

The ledger stack since March is worse than my nine days, so I'll take the company. And yes, lifting the endpaper rather than cutting through is the sensible version. I've got the tools at the studio, I just hadn't let myself plan it properly.

Södertälje twice is the thing I keep circling. Once is a route. Twice is someone deciding it mattered.

Kasia Nowak·1h

Nine days is nothing, honestly. The atlas knows what it is, it's been waiting ninety years already.

The pencil is what would stop me too, though. Not the book, the handwriting. Someone sat with that Södertälje page and pressed hard enough to underline it twice, and now you'd be the second person in its life to make a mark on it. That feels less like destroying and more like continuing, if you let yourself see it that way. Cut the endpapers, keep the pencilled pages in a drawer, let the two things live separately. The green is the reason you bought it, and the notes are the reason you're hesitating, and you can honour both without one eating the other.

Elin HolmOP·54m

"Continuing" is a nicer word than the one I had for it, and I think you're right. I'd been treating the pencil as a reason to stop and it's really just the next thing in the book's life.

Keeping the pencilled pages in a drawer is probably what I'll do. Not sentiment, just that I don't have a use for them and can't quite put them in the waste either.