‘Sabine’ comes home

Suzi Johns had never met a Sabine until she was standing in a parking lot at the Paterson border crossing, selling her custom-made camper to a couple from Canada.

The name reminded her of a trilogy from the early 1990s and prompted Johns to ask real-life Sabine if she’d ever read the “Griffin and Sabine” books. Not only had she never read them, she had never heard of them. So, a year later, when Johns finally unpacked the books after a move from a central Spokane condo to a ranchette west of town, she sent them to Sabine.

That’s how the trilogy about an extraordinary correspondence became part of an extraordinary correspondence.

At least 13 readers from five countries have perused this particular trilogy since Johns first mailed it out, hoping to share the story and start a kind of exchange via an airmail book club. Three years later, the books recently returned to Spokane.

“I have to admit I was a little sad to see them come back,” she said. “I think it’s just amazing that so many people took them, read them and sent them on.”

Published in 1991, “Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence” by Nick Bantock is the first of three visual novels that tell a long-distance love story through pull-out letters and postcards. Griffin Moss, a London artist who makes postcards for a living, receives one from Sabine Strohem, a young woman he’s never met. She illustrates postage stamps in the South Pacific.

“They start off as a love story, but then it’s a very different love story and just the way it ends is very mystical,” Johns said. “Was this really a love story or a mystery?”

The saga spent more than two years on The New York Times best-seller list and sold more than 3 million copies worldwide with 12 international editions.

Johns, 72, read the first book in 1994 after receiving it as a gift from her husband Ron, 81, for Valentine’s Day. He gave her the second book the next year and the third book the year after that. Each is inscribed with a note from her husband. They will have been married 35 years come New Year’s Eve. She said he doesn’t mind she mailed away his Valentine’s Day gifts.

“He just laughed,” Johns said. “They sat on the shelf for how many years and nobody read them and then I mailed them to Sabine. I thought she should have these books; they are books with her name on them. It’s not a common name.”

Johns met Sabine Guilbault of Sorrento, British Columbia, in 2010, coming together at the Canadian border to complete the sale of the camper.

When Guilbault finished the books – they’re not a long read – she contacted Johns about returning them. The more the women talked, the more they liked the idea of keeping them in transit, forming a kind of traveling book club and sending the volumes on a journey around the world.

The inspiration was three-fold.

After Guilbault bought the camper, she began sending Johns photos of it in pristine settings, showing the previous owner how her well-loved camper was being well-used.

This reminded Johns of the 2001 French film “Amélie,” in which a flight attendent takes a homebound man’s beloved garden gnome on her travels and sends him pictures of the statuette at famous landmarks worldwide to encourage him to leave his house.

And that reminded Johns of the “Traveling Pants” young adult series in which four friends of different sizes and shapes share a special pair of jeans that they take turns wearing and sending to each other. Published in 2001, “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” by Ann Brashares was made into a movie in 2005. Johns can’t remember if she saw that film or the 2008 sequel with a granddaughter who was a fan.

Regardless, “It was cute,” Johns said.

Recipients of her “Griffin and Sabine” series didn’t know the books were coming but were intrigued by the concept once they arrived.

Nieces sent them to aunts. Mothers sent them to daughters. One friend sent them to her bridesmaid more than four decades after her wedding. Most were strangers to Johns, who mailed a spiral-bound notebook along with the slim, square volumes.

In it, she wrote: “May each reader find joy in the story and may the books travel far.”

From the U.S. and Canada, the trilogy traveled to Wickford in Essex, England, where it connected with third reader Barbara Jocelyn. Johns had met her nearly 10 years earlier during a trip to Graceland in her old custom camper.

Jocelyn sent the books to a fellow bookworm in Arundel, West Sussex, England, who in turn sent them to Australia. There, they got into the hands of Ros Smith, the mother of John’s daughter-in-law, Natasha Johns, reader No. 6.

Johns knew of or had met four of the 13 women – other than herself – who read her books, which wound their way from Australia to New Zealand, then back to Australia before making their return trip to Johns at the beginning of this year.

The brown paper-wrapped parcel contained an added treasure: the notebook Johns had tucked inside the original package in January 2012. Like the books in the trilogy, it had been stuffed with notecards and postcards with handwritten messages and reflections on the reading along with the readers’ addresses and emails.

The ninth reader, Heather Washbrook of Auckland, New Zealand, shared – in October 2012 – that she had received the trilogy from a friend who had been her bridesmaid 42 years earlier. She sent them to her daughter, Victoria Haslam, also of Auckland, who wrote: “I read these enchanting books in one sitting and never wanted them to end! I hope you all enjoy the little bit of magic they will bring to your lives.”

Reader No. 11, Megan Frith, also of Auckland, compared the trilogy to “the Rubik’s Cube of picture books, and my brain will probably pick away at it forever and never really fully understand it.”

After numerous stops during the first year and a half, the trilogy was held up with two readers – one in New Zealand and one in Australia – for the second half of its three-year odyssey. Johns is looking forward to sending them back out into the world and seeing how far they get the second time around. She said she was hoping they wouldn’t return to her, but just keep going from reader to reader.

Still, she enjoyed the reflections readers she’d never met left in the spiral-bound notebook.

The last one, Karen Reynolds of Buderim, Queensland, Australia, wrote, “First, it was a love story, then it was a mystery, then a doorway to spirituality. For me, the books told me more about my character traits and to accept that sometimes you never find the answer to that nagging question.”