The Book and the Rose

Seth Davis is a young math teacher who finds a first edition of Anna Karenina that is full of someone else’s handwriting. The book’s margins carry personality, jokes, questions and glimpses of a life, and Seth starts piecing together the previous owner from those scribbles. As he reads, he projects hopes and fears onto the stranger, letting her annotations do most of the speaking. The film follows his internal shift from curiosity to a kind of affection based on those private notes, showing how books can feel like a map to another person, and how longing can grow from small, intimate details rather than direct contact.

Directed by Jeff Bemiss and based on material credited to Bemiss and Max Lucado, the film debuted in 2001 as a small, independent drama with a literary premise and an intimate cast.

Box office totals for The Book and the Rose aren’t widely reported. It had a limited release and modest distribution typical of indie films from that period, so reliable worldwide gross figures aren’t available.

Though it never became a mainstream sensation, the movie found a quiet audience among readers and small film viewers who liked the idea of books as connectors. Conversations about marginalia and emotional projection kept it alive in niche literary forums, and the image of a marked-up novel as a conduit between strangers stuck with some viewers.

Critical coverage was limited, so there isn’t a broad consensus, but reviewers who saw it noted its focus on loneliness, imagination, and how people interpret other people through artifacts. Performances were often described as sincere, and the film leans on mood and character over plot, asking what it means to fall for a person shaped mostly by ink on a page.