My co-worker handed the book to me across the circulation desk. The green cloth cover was faded and slightly tattered. I opened the cover and let out a quiet, “Oh!” The endpages were covered in green ink line drawings of birds and trees and grasses. While I often see beautiful endpages in children’s books, it was a pleasant surprise to see them in this book for adults – Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’ The Everglades: River of Grass (public library) originally published in 1947.

My reading of environmental literature and knowledge of its “canon” is spotty at best. I’ve attempted to remedy the situation over the past few years. I finally read Aldo Leopold’s classic, A Sand County Almanac (public library) last year. Recent events led me to Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. With no circulating copies available at the public library where I work, I requested the book via Prospector, a “local” interlibrary loan service comprised of libraries in Colorado and Wyoming.

As I marveled over the endpages, I noticed the book belonged to Regis University, a Jesuit school across town. This seemed appropriate given, as Regis states on their web site, “Jesuits are known for not being afraid to question and challenging the status quo. A Jesuit, Catholic college education is about striving for the greater good and learning to find God in all things. We position our students to think critically about the world and their role in it.”

Closer inspection of the title page and its verso revealed I was probably holding a first edition. There was also the stamp of Colorado Woman’s College (CWC) hidden under a line made by a thick, black marker. I live near the old CWC campus, now home to Johnson and Wales University. CWC merged with the University of Denver (DU) in 1982. I’m assuming the CWC library collection was dispersed among academic libraries in the area after the merger.

All of this is why I still love physical, print books and library ones in particular. Here, in this book about a vast wetland in the South, was also a tiny bit of local history of my arid West and in the book’s endpages, a promise of beauty to come in the text. No reader could ask for a better invitation.