Any act of engaging with a book may be construed as an act of “using” it. Indeed, the term “used books” refers to books that were previously owned. Yet there are books that were produced expressly to allow the owner to carry out specific activities, from cooking and identifying plants and herbs to “telling” on what day a religious holiday will fall. There are also books whose marks of use, such as the insertion of plant specimens on the corresponding pages of an herbal (a book devoted to identifying plants and their curative properties), provide evidence that the owner used them in the way they were intended. As objects of use, such books were embedded in the quotidian lives of their owners, and carry their traces.