I Love Collecting Cool Stuff

I collect antique books. Not the pristine kind, more the well used, usually written in kind. Mainly because I prefer a book with a visible history, as well as potentially clues to the previous owner's life.
One of my favourites is a set of leather Shakespeare books that I got in a charity shop, that belonged to a Lillian J Merry, which according to the message inside the cover, got the books as a Christmas present from her friends (also named) in 1895.
I like to look the people I find in books like that on Ancestry.com, and it turns out that Lillian Merry was born in 1865, and was a botanist, amongst other things.
It's these little things, as well as the way that marks like handwriting or fingerprints are so distinctive that make me collect these things. I love the sense of immediacy they give me, as if their time and mine are running parallel to each other, just a step away.