This is poignant and beautiful, and resonates with a lot of my own book buying (on the web, not infrequently books deaccessioned from libraries, not infrequently university and college libraries) over the past decade or so.  So many wonderful books are becoming available at incredibly low prices, simply because of the internet's book marketing systems (and here Amazon is the behemoth).  I now own an early sixteenth-century copy of the second half of Augustine's de civitate Dei, with annotations in the hand of someone I take to be a sixteenth or seventeenth century reader; I own a copy of the fantastic history of Clare College Cambridge that Mansfield Forbes produced in 1928.  I delight in these, I read them, I use them as their authors and their publishers would want.  But everytime I buy a book, I grieve over the place that has lost it. 

I cannot tell whether anyone in West Virginia ever actually read my copy of Gow, but West Virginia in those days was the sort of place that knew Gow belonged there. 

Walter Benjamin's famous essay, "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction", talks about the annihilation of the "aura" around the individual object.  I am one of those who think that over time, even mass-produced objects such as printed books can still gain a patina of idiosyncratic significances that render each one distinctive enough to be incommensurable, to a discerning eye, with any other.  Each book has a journey through space and time, and the traces of those journeys are sometimes visible on the books in wondrous ways.

I suppose that means I am ok with buying books from libraries that are getting rid of them, for then my possession of them--hopefully only temporary--will only be a part of their larger story.  

It's a humbling thought that a book's life is larger than your own.  But it seems accurate to me.