One thing I simply cannot bring myself to do is write in books that I love. It just feels like graffiti – how can my banal scribblings sit comfortably next to the immortal words of Shakespeare? However, it’s quite a different story when I’m shopping for second hand books: I actively seek out old tomes containing notes, dedications, declarations. Perhaps it’s the anonymity that makes these marginalia so fascinating to me – who were these people, what were their lives like and what did this book mean to them?

My absolute favourite second hand bookshop is Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland. Situated inside an old train station, it’s an enormous treasure trove of ancient pre-owned books stacked in giant shelves linked by a toy train set that whizzes above the heads of shoppers. Basically it’s a book-lover’s nirvana.

Wandering between the shelves a few years ago, a blue clothbound edition of Oscar Wilde’s stories caught my eye, and like many of the books there it contained a block of barely legible calligraphy. It wasn’t until I got home that I realised the writing was in German. German writing dated two years before the start of World War Two, in an English book that had somehow found its way to an obscure bookshop in Northumberland – one thing was for sure, I had to have this translated. This turned out to be more difficult than expected. The poem had been transcribed in a dialect that was no longer used in modern Germany and thus the text had to be sent to the translator’s (a middle-aged man himself) grandmother back in Germany. Finally I received the following lines:

And as long as you have not attained
This; Die and become!,
You will only be a gloomy guest
On the dark earth.

This is the final stanza of a poem entitled ‘Blessed Yearning’ by Wolfgang von Goethe written in 1814. Various other translations exist, but all are essentially just as grim. The quoted stanza implies that until you have died and somehow been reborn (‘become’), you’re going to have a bloody miserable time on this gloomy rock – uplifting stuff. The more superstitious may have seen this as a sign to get rid of the book – yes, it’s definitely creepy, but from a historical perspective it’s absolutely fascinating. On the cusp of the most concentrated period of loss of human life the world has ever seen, someone scrawled a few lines on an inside cover about how death is necessary for rebirth. World War Two marked the death of a conscience that existed previously; humanity altered beyond recognition in those six years and at the end was reborn from the ashes of the death they had wrought.

It may only be coincidence that someone decided to note down these lines of German poetry in an English book in 1937, but nevertheless the words ring with an almost prophetic foreboding of the horrors that were to come in the following years.