Eureka!

 It’s hard to explain to the uninitiated the pleasures of a bookstore. Here’s a stab at it:

For years, I’ve had a running page in my endless series of composition books labeled “String too short to be saved.”

Each page with this odd heading is a place for mere suggestions of notes — notes that are too short to be a proper note. The jotting might remind me to think harder and make a note out of the scrap.

All this might sound odd, but keepers of notebooks are a bit eccentric.

I got the title from a collection of stories about a New England farm by Donald Hall. I’d read about Hall’s book somewhere, which has this epigraph:

 

A man was cleaning the attic of an old house in New England and he found a box which was full of tiny pieces of string. On the lid of the box there was an inscription in an old hand: “String too short to be saved.”

 

Bookstores in my part of the world aren’t exactly crammed with old books about farms in New England.

And then there it was.

• Source: Donald Hall, String Too Short to Be Saved; Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1979.