This post was written by Maggie Dittemore, librarian in the John Wesley Powell Library of Anthropology.
You can’t go far in the stacks of the Anthropology Library without finding a book that has at least two stories to tell — that of its published contents and that of the book itself. Many volumes were once part of researchers’ personal libraries or otherwise “had another life” before reaching us. Because we have such rich collections, we don’t always know what is there.