A cherished childhood book finds me again

In about 1979 my sister and I held a yard sale of toys outside our house in Wantage, Oxfordshire. To swell the meagre offerings I put in my Rupert Bear annuals. Almost the only thing that sold was my copy of the 1954 annual, which was snapped up by a stranger. I regretted it almost immediately, and spent the next 30 years looking without success in jumble sales and second-hand bookshops. With the coming of the internet I searched for copies of the 1954 annual for sale online, and found that they were all very expensive. This turned out to be because it will never be reprinted owing to a "racist" story involving Al Jolson-like people called "coons", who also featured in the cover picture. I all but gave up hope of ever reading my little son the other stories in the book, which had captivated me more than any other Rupert annual as a child. One day in 2009 my mother visited a car boot sale on Cheltenham racecourse, 50 miles from Wantage. She saw a Rupert annual and bought it for my son. When she described the cover picture over the phone I was overjoyed - it was a 1954 annual. When we unwrapped the parcel, however, I began to get a strange feeling. There was damage to the spine in the same spot as I remembered causing, when I had lifted the cardboard to see if a secret world lay beneath a picture of a brown imp. The colouring competition was already done, just as it had been, to my chagrin, in my copy. But the name of the child who had done the colouring was written above: Susan Horne - the same as had been in my copy. Not only was it a 1954 annual, it was the very same one I had sold in 1979. There is another layer of coincidence to this story. My grandmother originally bought the book for me at a jumble sale in Cheltenham, where she lived at the time. So the book started in Cheltenham, was bought for a grandson and taken to Wantage, then somehow found its way back to Cheltenham only to be bought for another grandson and taken to Wantage again, this time by my mother.