I'm guessing my grandfather didn't have much use for English literature as a young man.
It is such a hard leap to make, I know.
On the side, though, he wrote "When nothing else could help I tried Chaucer." He dog-eared a few pages from the Elizabethan period.
In the contemporary section, precisely where the authors introduce the transition from romanticism to realism, there's a decades-old 3x5 index card. On one side he wrote Milton's name and a list of periods, probably as reminders for a test. There's also a mention of Edmund Spencer, the great Ben Johnson and a line referencing Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his love."
On the other side is a purchase list. He was pricing out a radio-telephone, a telegraph transmitter, receiver, a TV, a multitester and signal generator. He was far more passionate about those things. What child of the 1940s wouldn't be?