Second Hand Books – Jephcott

For anyone interested  in marginalia the secondhand/used book market has to be an untapped source of material. The joy of buying used books is often more than just being able to get hold of an obscure text, a now deleted classic or whatever, its about the annotations, markings and notes that others add to the text that make those books interesting. For our research on Pearl Jephcott we, like others, have had to scour the secondhand book sellers to obtain copies of her works and we now have a fairly complete set of her books. Remarkably these books are quite ‘clean’ in terms of marginalia  – with two surprising exceptions. The version of the book A Troubled Area we have appears to be the version Pearl herself donated to the University of Glasgow library in 1964. We can tell this given her signature, date plus the GUL book plate on the inside cover. We also – quite by chance – purchased a copy of Girls Growing Up that Jephcott had autographed in 1942. A form of fateful(?) marginalia we are more than pleased to have.

Inside the front cover of  A Troubled Area.