A Life Erased
Though the other books in this exhibit focus on specific people in their histories, a book's story is most often a synthesis of lives and stories as its ownership changes.
Take for instance this 4-volume set of Alexander Pope's poems. All four volumes have identical (from what we can assume) bookplates. However, someone has since scratched or rubbed the bookplates to the point of illegibility. Whether intentional or unintentional, the damage to the plates obsures the ownership information and unique design, effectively striking this previous ownership from the books' historical record. It is almost impossible to identify the owner of this book who placed the bookplates because of this retroactive provenance erasure.
Who defaced these bookplates? Why would they remove evidence of a provenance? Perhaps they were a later owner wishing to "clean" the book to make it more personal. Perhaps they were a seller wishing to . Perhaps the books were handled so much that the bookplates rubbed off accidentally (though this is unlikely, since the scratching occurs on all four volumes and appears to be deliberate).
But there might be other ways to resurface elements of this book's provenance.