The Bookplate in the Front of the Book

Marge Emmons opened the copy of Wendell Berry at eight-fifty-two, turned the small brass gooseneck lamp on the counter, and set the kettle for tea.

Marjorie Louise "Marge" Prescott Emmons — Peterborough Elementary '58, Peterborough High '62, Wellesley '68 (English, second honors, senior thesis on Elizabeth Bishop under Anne Sexton in the spring), reference librarian at the Peterborough Town Library on Concord Street from the September of 1971 until her retirement on the last Friday of June, 2013 — had lived in the small yellow farmhouse at 74 Concord Street, four doors down from the library itself, since a warm Saturday afternoon in the June of 1974, when she and her husband Whitfield Alden Emmons — Dartmouth '65, MLA from the Conway School of Landscape Design in 1969, in practice at his own small office off Main Street for thirty-nine years — had signed the mortgage at the Peoples Bank on Grove Street with the ink from Whit's father's Sheaffer fountain pen and driven the four blocks home in the green 1971 Volvo 145 that Whit's cousin at Farrar-Brown had sold them for four hundred dollars in the March.

Whit had passed at home, in the small back study on the first floor with the north window that looks out on the two red oaks he had planted in 1976, on the tenth of December, 2021, of the small quiet heart the cardiologist at Monadnock Community Hospital had told them, in the September, was not going to see another spring. Ellen Farrell, RN, from Home Health & Hospice Care in Merrimack, had been in the room. Marge had been in the room. The old grey shorthair cat Emmeline, sixteen, had been on the corduroy chair by the window.

The library in the farmhouse — the reason there had never been a formal dining room — takes up the whole west side of the first floor. Two walls of built-ins Whit finished in cherry in the winter of 1976. A rolling library ladder from a school-district auction in Keene in 1981. A small kneehole desk that had been Marge's grandmother's in Dublin. Two red-leather club chairs from an estate sale on Hancock Road in 1989. And, on the shelves, in the plain hand-lettered organization system Marge devised in the summer of 1977 — a system a reference librarian would understand and no computer will ever be asked to replicate — two thousand four hundred and thirty-seven books.

She began plating them, at the maple kitchen table, on the second Tuesday of March, 2023.

What the Bookplate Is

The bookplate is a small ivory rectangle, two inches by three, printed on the eighty-pound cotton paper that Michel LaFramboise, the retired pressman who runs the small letterpress shop out of the back of the old Whitcomb Woolen Mill in West Peterborough on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, has been selling to poets and small-press printers up and down the Souhegan since the summer of 1994.

Marge's friend Priscilla Wentworth, in Amherst — Wellesley '68, retired professor of book history at Smith, and the woman who first taught Marge, in the winter of 1966, that a book is a small careful room and every page is a piece of furniture in it — had set the type for the plate on an ancient IBM Selectric in her sunporch in the March of 2023, on a warm Wednesday morning after their monthly telephone call, and mailed the proof to Peterborough the following Monday in a plain kraft envelope with the return address penciled in the corner.

The plate reads, in a serif Priscilla chose because it was the face of Anne Sexton's first Houghton Mifflin edition in 1960:

Ex libris Marjorie Prescott Emmons. Peterborough, New Hampshire. In hope this book finds its way to a reader whose Wednesday afternoon it improves.

Michel printed the run — ninety-six plates to a sheet, thirty sheets, twenty-eight hundred and eighty plates in total — on a Friday afternoon in the April of 2023 and refused to take payment. Marge left, on the counter beside the small green Chandler & Price treadle, a jar of the wild-strawberry jam she puts up at the end of June from the berries in the field behind the Congregational church.

She has, since the second Tuesday of March 2023, plated two thousand and three books.

She has four hundred and thirty-four to go.

She has, in the small green cloth-bound notebook on the kitchen counter — a notebook she bought at the small stationer's on Grove Street a week after Whit's funeral — decided, book by book, over three years and four months, where each shelf of the library is going to go.

What the Shelves Say

The shelves say, in the plain reference-librarian's hand of a woman who has been shelving books in the same building for forty-two years:

The New England naturalists — Thoreau, Bugbee, Beston, Bernd Heinrich, Sy Montgomery, the small run of the Peterborough Ornithological Club Bulletin from 1948 through 1979 — are going to the Harris Center for Conservation Education in Hancock, where Whit sat on the advisory board from 1994 until 2018.

The small-press American poetry, roughly three hundred and eighty volumes — the Copper Canyon paperbacks, the Alice James chapbooks, the signed first of Bishop's Geography III she bought at the Grolier in Cambridge in October of 1976 — is going to the MacDowell Colony library in Peterborough, four blocks up High Street, where Marge worked the reference desk on the second Wednesday of every month from the September of 1988 until the pandemic in the March of 2020.

The garden history, and Whit's professional books, and the seven boxes of hand-drawn Whit-Emmons landscape plans from 1969 through 2014 — the church garden in Dublin, the terraces at the small college in Winchester, the pond at the Waldrons' up on Nubanusit — are going to the Conway School in Easthampton, where Whit did his graduate work and where his old teacher George Zoto's granddaughter is now in the second year of the certificate.

The children's books — three hundred and twelve of them, from the Beatrix Potter set Marge's Aunt Louise mailed her from London in the June of 1953 through the small stack of Kevin Henkes her granddaughter Nora left on the coffee table at Christmas — are going to the Peterborough Town Library, where they will go into the small pine cart Marge herself built with Whit in 1978 for the third-grade summer-reading program.

The Wellesley College books — the four-volume Norton Shakespeare Anne Sexton signed for her in the spring of 1968, the small run of the Wellesley Review from 1965 through her senior year, the copy of Vendler's Music of What Happens Ellen Meade gave her at their twenty-fifth reunion in 1993 — are going to Clapp Library at Wellesley, in a cardboard box Marge's daughter Nora will drive down herself in the fall of the year Marge does not need them anymore.

The novels, and the poetry, and the shelves that are not going anywhere in particular — the eleven hundred and forty-one books Marge has been reading, and re-reading, and lending, and getting back, since the January of 1963 — are going to the small yellow farmhouse two doors up on Concord Street, where Marge's niece Ida, a music teacher at the ConVal Regional Middle School, moved in with her husband and their two boys in the June of 2024, and where Ida's older boy Sam, in the third grade, has already started pulling the Kingfisher encyclopedias down off the low shelf on Saturday mornings.

Every one of those decisions is written down in the small green cloth-bound notebook on the kitchen counter.

Every one of those books, plated in the last three years, is a small quiet handshake from Marge — at the kitchen table, on a Friday morning in July — to the shelf in Peterborough or Hancock or Wellesley or Easthampton where it is going to sit, next summer or the summer after or the June that follows the last long winter.

The bookplate is the announcement.

What the Wellesley Second Floor Thinks It Knows

On the second floor of a small brick building on College Green in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on the same Friday morning at nine-eleven, the assistant director of gift planning — a warm and capable woman named Priya Ramachandran Sullivan, class of 2009, hired from an urban schools nonprofit in Boston in the fall of 2022 — is looking at the third-quarter class-of-1968 report on the laptop at a glass-topped desk under a window that faces the Chapel.

The file open on Priya's second monitor, in the small quiet suggestion column of the fifty-fifth-reunion legacy-cultivation queue, reads:

EMMONS, MARJORIE P. (née PRESCOTT). '68. Concord St., Peterborough NH. Segment 4. Annual fund $50 sustained since 2004. Spouse deceased 12/2021. Wealth-screen capacity range $0–$50K. No engagement noted. Not on any current volunteer roster. Suggested ask, spring appeal: $75.

The wealth-screen vendor ran Marge in the spring of 2025 and returned, courteously, the same $0–$50K capacity band on the strength of the same public real-estate record — one small yellow farmhouse on Concord Street in Peterborough, assessed in 2024 at three hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars, paid off in 1999. The screen did not know about the shelves. The screen did not know about the plates. The screen did not know about the notebook.

Priya has never met Marge Emmons.

Priya has never opened The Unsettling of America to the front pastedown.

Priya has never walked down Concord Street in Peterborough on a warm Friday morning in July.

Neither has anybody on the second floor of the small brick building on College Green, since the summer of 2013.

What the Peterborough Ground Floor Thinks It Knows

Four blocks down Concord Street, on the ground floor of the small brick library founded in the April of 1833 as the first tax-supported free public library in the world, the young director of the library foundation — a bright and cheerful woman named Sarah Boutin Callahan, ConVal '05, UNH '09, back home in Peterborough with her family since the summer of 2019 — is opening the same weekly gifts report at eight fifty-seven a.m.

Sarah's file has Emmons, Marjorie P., retired staff, sustaining member $60/year, spouse Whit deceased, no active engagement, suggested spring appeal $85.

Sarah has walked past 74 Concord Street twice a day, on her way to and from the library, for the last seven years. Sarah has, in fact, waved to Marge on the porch on Saturday mornings a dozen times since the summer of 2020. Sarah does not know about the plates either.

Neither institution knows.

Every book on Marge's shelves knows.

What the Bookplate Knows

The bookplate is the plainest legacy document a donor will ever write.

It is glued, in the front pastedown, in the plain unhurried hand of a woman who has been shelving books in the same building since 1971. It is not on a wealth screen. It does not appear on any legacy-society roster. It is not on the reply card at the bottom of the fall appeal. It is not, in any measurable sense, in the CRM.

It is on the pastedown of the book. That is the whole document.

Each of Marge's plates, glued between the second Tuesday of March 2023 and the last Friday of July 2026, is a small quiet piece of philanthropic writing. Each is a decision. Each names — not in dollars, but in weight, in inches of shelf, in years-of-reading — the small careful institution that Marge, at the kitchen table on a Friday morning, has decided will inherit that piece of her attention.

If a screening vendor produced, in an email to Priya Ramachandran Sullivan at eight fifty-seven on Friday morning, the plain sentence your donor Marjorie Prescott Emmons has, over the past three years, personally hand-glued eight hundred and forty-two ex libris plates into the books on the Wellesley section of her library, and there are two hundred and eleven more to go, Priya would close her laptop, cancel her ten o'clock, and get in her Subaru.

The plates are in Peterborough.

The Subaru is in the Wellesley faculty lot.

Both women are, at nine-eleven on a warm Friday morning in July, thinking about the same shelf.

Neither one knows the other is.

A small honest note about Rōmy

Rōmy did not print Marge's plate. Michel LaFramboise did, on the small green Chandler & Price treadle in the back of the old Whitcomb Woolen Mill on a warm Friday afternoon in the April of 2023, for a jar of wild-strawberry jam.

Rōmy did not glue the plate into The Unsettling of America. Marge did, at the maple kitchen table, at nine-eleven on Friday morning, in the plain unhurried way she taught two generations of eighth graders to glue the frontispiece into a report.

What Rōmy can do is notice.

Not instead of Priya Sullivan. Priya is the reason the story ends the way it should. She is the one who will drive to Peterborough, in the second week of September, park the Subaru in the small gravel lot behind the Congregational church, walk the two blocks down Concord Street, sit on the porch with Marge for an hour, ask about Whit and about the two red oaks, admire the shelves without asking a single question about them, and — before she goes — thank Marge, quietly, for the fifty-eight years.

Rōmy is the small note on Priya's Wednesday-morning list, six weeks before she gets in the Subaru, that reads: Marjorie Prescott Emmons ('68, Peterborough NH). A small letterpress ex libris plate designed for her library in March 2023 has surfaced on a used copy of Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III listed this week at the Toadstool Bookshop on Grove Street. The plate reads, In hope this book finds its way to a reader whose Wednesday afternoon it improves. Suggested: a plain notecard, this week, from the director of Clapp Library, in her own hand, thanking Marge for the fifty-eight years and asking whether she might, sometime this fall, drive up to Peterborough to see the shelves. Do not put a case for support in the envelope. Would you like a draft, in your own voice?

The notecard goes out on Monday.

Marge reads it, at the maple kitchen table, on Thursday afternoon.

By the third week of October, on a warm Saturday morning, Priya is in the small yellow farmhouse on Concord Street, on the red-leather club chair by the window, with a cup of Earl Grey and a small plate of shortbread and the copy of Anne Sexton's All My Pretty Ones Marge has pulled down off the top shelf so Priya can see the inscription on the flyleaf.

The reading is Priya's. The notice is the tool's. The plate is Marge's.

A small assignment, with love ♡

This fall, on the first afternoon you find yourself in a donor's living room, do one small unfashionable thing.

Do not look at the art on the walls. Everybody looks at the art. Do not look at the photographs on the mantel. Everybody looks at the photographs.

Look at the books.

Walk over to the nearest bookshelf. Pull down the book on the second shelf, third from the left — the one whose spine is a little more worn than the others. Do not open it to a page. Open it to the front pastedown.

Look for a small rectangle. Cotton paper. Ivory or cream. A serif face. A name. A town.

If there is one, read it out loud, quietly, to yourself, the way Marge Emmons read Elizabeth Bishop out loud to Whit in the small back study on Sunday afternoons in the fall of 1978. Read the name. Read the town. Read the last small line — the one about the Wednesday afternoon, or the one about the granddaughter, or the one about the shelf the book is hoping to end up on.

Then, before you leave the house, ask your donor, quietly, one small question.

Are you working on the shelves yet?

She is.

She has been, on Friday mornings at the maple kitchen table, since a Tuesday in March three years ago.

She has not, until you asked her, been asked. ♡