I checked out “Sailing Fundamentals” [ISBN 0 671 60598 4] from the library and noticed inside, partly covered by a piece of paper, a dedication:
“from the woman in the treehouse
to the man living out on a limb
/signed/ S
17-i-95”
From there, the book went to the Seattle Sailing Club, and then on to the library.
What would induce someone to part with a book inscribed to them? Perhaps they forgot or parted on bad terms . . . .
See a scan of the flyleaf.
Incidentally, I did all the scanning and image munging in free tools on a FreeBSD machine. I have an old Astra 1200S scanner from UMAX (Ebay has ’em for $5 now), and I used xscanimage from the SANE project and the Gimp to acquire and save the image. Both SANE and the Gimp are in the FreeBSD ports collection, so they’re installed in minutes. I had to get a SCSI card (Ebay to the rescue) and ended up with an Adaptec 2940U for $15 (the cables to hook it up cost more).