Sending a letter to the previous owner of a book?

[pne]

I thought I’d have a look at Teeline shorthand.

To this end, I ordered a number of books, second-hand (some through Amazon, some through eBay—I got a couple of Amazon ones for €0.01! Presumably the €3.00 postage allowance that Amazon gives senders is enough for them to make a bit of money off the book.).

One of the contains the name and full address of the previous owner: a lady in Scotland.

Now I was wondering whether to send her a little letter saying “Hi, in case you’re wondering where your book ended up after you sold it to a dealer, it ended up here in Germany. Thanks!”, or something like that. But I’m not sure whether that would be too creepy.

What do you all think?

Comments

[evilsusan]

She might be dead. A lot of books get sold off by the relatives. Have you tried googling her?

[pne]

The first couple of hits for her name seem to be her - they're graduation results from a local college (this being the UK, I suppose she'd have been 18 or so? not like "college" in the US), in 2004, in "HNC Administration and Information Management".

I'm not sure whether I can derive any information from that.

[evilsusan]

Ah, when you said "lady," I thought "old lady."

[pne]

Ah. Well, to be honest, I had no idea how old she might be (I only had her name and address), and used "lady" to refer merely to her gender.

[pthalo]

I don't think it's creepy as such...kinda cute. Depends on how you word it...if you write it casually and friendly it should be fine.