TUSCON, Ariz. – Shelves upon shelves of novels, picture books, dictionaries, how-to-books, technical manuals, annual reports.

Libraries are full of these works, which eventually transcend their mass-produced status through accumulated quirks: wear and tear, scribbled notes or the checkout patterns of the slowly forgotten.

It’s that world that fascinated Ander Monson, a Houghton native whose essay collection “Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries,” was released earlier this year.

Monson, an assistant English professor at the University of Arizona, originally wrote the essays on index cards placed back inside the books that had inspired them. They were collected in a limited edition that featured the index cards in a randomized order.

The book version sets them in alphabetical order, from “A,” about Pierce Butler’s “Books and Libraries in Wartime,” last checked out 68 years ago, to “Z,” which tackles classification systems.

Monson got the idea for the book while doing press for his previous book, “Vanishing Point,” an experiment in fusing print with websites. He was repeatedly asked if he saw e-books eclipsing the printed variety.

“I found it to be a strange thing to ask,” he said. “I love digital and do a lot of work online, but at the same time I don’t feel the print book is going anywhere.”

Monson was spending a lot of time in libraries, and coming across a lot of strange notations. He began thinking about the accumulated history of a book, whether through the wear of a cracked spine or through highlighted text.

“I kind of got fascinated by that idea, that we’re not just reading the book in front of us, you’re seeing the person,” he said.

Compared to the digital technologies that would threaten to supplant it – pause to remember the departed Zip drive – books from a thousand years ago can still be read.

That longevity and persistence is built into the project, Monson said, where the 6-by-9 handwritten cards were written to an unknown person who would find the book in a week, 10 years or a century.

A couple of his students found some of the essays after going on a hunt. Monson’s yet to hear from anyone else who’s encountered one in a while, but he hopes.

“I wanted to speak to them, to some extent to say something about what is like to be alike now, who I am now, and ask them what is it like for them, what is a library like … libraries will continue to be important, perhaps even more so,” he said.

The essays respond to a variety of relationships with books: a three-page letter to a former love inscribed in Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island,” or the commenter in a Mortimer Adler book who responded to the sentence “Everyone, I think, will admit that a book is a work of art” with “Not this one.”

Monson devotes the most space to a man who was banned from the University of Arizona library after severely defacing books, doing a felony amount of damage. In a book on gay and lesbian historical figures, the man wrote homophobic comments throughout the book. At that length, the defacer, railing against the ease with which celebrities come out, may have revealed more of themselves than they even realized.

“I imagine you as troll, here to irritate all comes from your location raging underneath the bridge,” Monson wrote. “I imagine you as bully: difficult to defend yourself against a ghost. … But the final heart inside the other hearts … is as confessor, unintentional: write long enough and hard enough into the space past waking or attention and you find yourself unspooling.”

Putting together the book also helped Monson expand his notion of what a library could be. He visited the empty space of the Biosphere 2 library, where the only books left are scattered cookbooks in the kitchen; the Pima County Public Library’s seed library, where borrowers plant seeds and harvest more to bring back; and the backseat library of United Airlines flight 5437, Tucson to Denver, including barf bags, a passenger safety card. and a SkyWest magazine with an article on the Keweenaw.

Monson retains vivid memories of the Portage Lake District Library, which was still in the Carnegie Building during his youth. He remembers the tile and the high ceilings, his first time moving from the kid floor to the adult floor, and the sense of possibility he felt learning about the world.

“The Houghton one – that’s always been my library,” he said. “It’s the library that I think of when I think of what a library is and what a library should be.”

He recently found something like it in Bisbee, Arizona – also an old mining town with a Carnegie-funded library. Inside, he found a drawer of card catalogue cards written by eighth-graders 20 years ago for fictional books, along the lines of “Unicorn Fights a Ninja,” or “My Friend Has a Really Bad Day.”

“It’s a microcosm of what I love about printed books,” he said. “It was an experience by a group of kids 20 years ago, and you’re immediately transported back there.”