MADAM – I sympathise with your correspondent Phil Higginbotham (Letters, ATG No 2335), who decries booksellers’ notes on endpapers.
However, it is the method that can be at fault, not the notes themselves.
Notes written with a hard pencil, as he says, can horribly deface an endpaper, especially yellow glazed ones. However, if written intelligently and correctly, that is, lightly and with a 3B or 4B pencil in the right place, such notes can be erased if desired. If left, they can add considerably to the book’s provenance for future owners.