To my, a pre-owned book's antecedents are often as interesting as the book itself. Not that I expected to find any evidence of the previous owner's life when I picked up this beautifully kept hardcover copy of Simon Winchester's "Atlantic", which I had bought and read before but not as a hardcover, and so I picked it up for a mere three dollars at the local Vinnies shop.
I was a whole 300 pages into the book - which is 500 pages thick - before I discovered this business card stuck between the pages as a bookmark: "GLEAM DENTISTRY - Haifa Amin, BDS, Dental Surgeon".
Was it Haifa Amin herself - it is a "her" as I discovered on GOOGLE - who had placed it there or was it one of her patients who tried to take his mind off a throbbing toothache by reading Simon Winchester's classic?
Simon Winchester is a past master at turning even the driest subject into a thrilling story; indeed, he seems to have specialised in it by writing such books as "The Map That Changed the World", "Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded", "Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World", and over thirty other non-fiction books, enough to take your mind off all your toothaches for the rest of your life.
Before I leave you alone on this foggy and slightly chilly Thursday morning, I just want to tell you that things in the Middle East are improving: in a first act of goodwill since the declaration of a ceasefire, yesterday Iran permitted a container ship loaded with copies of the Epstein files to pass through the Strait of Hormuz - see photo above.
