In a smart NPR post, Amanda Katz wonders what the advent of e-books will mean to the generational passing down of volumes, using as an example a boyhood copy of War of the Worlds owned by pioneering rocketeer Robert Goddard. The opening:

“In 1898, a man bought a book for his 16-year-old nephew. ‘Many happy retoins [sic]. Uncle Spud,’ he wrote on a blank page at the front.

The book: H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, then just out in America from Harper & Brothers.The ripping tale of a Martian attack that set the mold for them all, it’s almost more striking to a reader today for its turn-of-the-century detail: carriage-horse accidents, urgent telegrams, news only via newspapers. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator gets ahold of a first post-attack copy of the Daily Mail: ‘I learned nothing fresh except that already in one week the examination of the Martian mechanisms had yielded astonishing results. Among other things, the article assured me what I did not believe at the time, that the ‘Secret of Flying’ was discovered.’

This was, of course, science fiction. But it was also prophetic. Uncle Spud’s teenage nephew — who stamped his name on the first page of the novel and read it religiously once a year — would himself go on to discover many secrets of flying. That nephew was Robert Hutchings Goddard, inventor of the liquid-fuel rocket.” (Thanks Browser.)

See also:

• The New York Times thinks Goddard a fool for believing rockets can reach the moon. (1920)