I once went to repaint an old dresser and found taped to the back of one drawer a yellowed classified ad for a used bedroom set for $15. The dresser had come into our family minus the rest of the set by way of a long ago divorce, and it’s unlikely the other party would have been sober long enough to have found a roll of tape, so it probably predated him. I always pictured some excited newlyweds buying the set for their first house and taping the ad inside as a memento.
My sister bought a used car and found under one of the seats what appeared to be an ax handle. The bottom had been taped up so you could get a good grip. For a while it became our go-to carry along when we had to walk somewhere at night. “Take the ax handle with you! It’s dark out!”
My grandmother bought, for a very token sum, a used couch from family friends. She ended up finding $500 tucked down inside. Being very religious, she immediately tried to return it, but they shrugged it off. Given that my grandmother was on a poverty-level fixed income and the friends were well-to-do, I always suspected they left it there on purpose for her.
$600.00 US in a used book at a very large used book sale. 440,000 books had been donated; there was no way to find out who’d given this particular book.
I’ve never had anything like that happen before or since. $100 went to charity, and by the time I put the rest in the bank, the Canadian/US dollar difference made my deposit over $800.
At a yard sale, I bought a large glass vase still in its original box, looking like it never had been used. When I got it home, I found there was a empty liter-sized plastic vodka bottle hidden inside the box. Looks like I discovered an alcoholic’s “secret” empties stashing place. Probably the wife’s; she knew her husband would never look in a vase box.
I bought a used car from a lot in my mid twenties. When I got it home, I found a set of golf clubs in the trunk. I took them to a used sports equipment store and got $50 for them.
I buy storage units occasionally, and have found some neat unexpected stuff in a few of those - nothing life changing, but along the lines of a new Milwaukee 2 piece drill/driver combo set with batteries, charger and carry bag plus other brand new tools worth ~$400 in a unit I paid $30 for.
Back in college I bought a copy of Doña Bárbara from the campus used bookstore. The book was printed in 1958 or '59. It had lots of translations in the margins, notes about the thesis, etc, which is why I picked it.
On page 20 or so someone had written “Turn to page 200 for A BOOB!” So I did, and in the same handwriting on Page 200 was “Ha! YOU are the BOOB!”
Nice one Past Student - you got me, Future Student, 30 years later.
The vase, which was actually more of a high-shouldered glass urn, was in there. The bottle was underneath the protruding “shoulder” and so not immediately visible if you just peeked into the box from above.
In the mid-70s I bought an entire grocery bag full of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazines from a yard sale for about $5. Hidden away at the very bottom of the bag was a paperback copy of “The Happy Hooker” by Xaviera Hollander. To a 10-year-old, that was a major score.
Twice, I’ve bought used books that turned out to be autographed, though they weren’t sold as such. One was a mystery novel by the late Steve Allen, autographed by his wife Jayne Meadows. The other was a cookbook of various cartoonists’ favorite recipes, autographed by Irv Philips, creator of “The Strange World of Mr. Mum.”
This isn’t exactly the same thing, but an acquaintance of mine once bought a secondhand Grateful Dead album, only to get it home and find out that the record inside contained the music of the Acapulco Marimbas.
Feeling nostalgic, I recently bought used paperback copies of William Gibson’s sprawl trilogy at a nearby used book store.
Turned out they were all signed by the author, and in the back of Neuromancer was a flyer for the book signing event I assume they were signed at. It was in 1989.
