It’s not exactly a book, but I bought a framed illustration (labelled as a “Victorian Postcard”) from an antiques store in Appalachia (WV). I took it home and opened up the frame, and it was not just a postcard (with a Virginia postmark dating from the early 20th century, iirc), but the letter was a rather effusive epistle from one girl to her very very dear bosom friend Bertha.
Once in a library book, I found an airplane ticket stub. Weird thing was, it was someone I knew…who had been a coworker in a suburb that was some distance from the one I lived in, and I didn’t know that she lived there, too (or maybe she didn’t, and got the book from inter-library loan? I have no idea.) I know for sure it was the same person, because she has an unusual hyphenated name.
I found a 5" x 7" picture of a toddler boy in a library book. Nothing special, just a typical family-photo-type of pic. I gave it to the library’s “Lost & Found” department.
Not a book, but a thrift shop: I found three $5 bills and a credit card receipt, dated some years before, in a pocket of a pair of shorts I was trying on. I bought the shorts, kept the cash and shredded the receipt. Had I been able to track down the credit card holder, I would have returned the money. Or that’s what I tell myself, anyway. 
I was clearing out our bookcases a couple of weeks ago and I found a Canadian $1 bill that apparently I had put aside for safe keeping when the looney was released, a picture of my daughters first roller coaster ride and 4 savings bonds I thought I’d lost in the last move.
I get most of my books from thrift stores, but most are disappointingly lacking in bonus content.
Found in a fairly recent hardcover book: a yellowed business reply card for Book Club Associates Inc., offering mostly diet books, a Popular Medical Encyclopedia, and Natural Child Spacing. There are no numbers in the mailing address, and the company offers an installment plan for orders exceeding three dollars.
Written in pencil on the inside front cover of Agatha Christie’s The Clocks: “Nothing ‘untoward’ happened.” Aside from murder and espionage, one assumes.
I ordered a used copy of Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut from Amazon. The copyright on the book is from 1973. Inside there was a postcard advertising the Governor Quality Inn motor hotel just outside of Washington DC. It also appears to be from the 1970s.
Good timing!
Terribly uninteresting, I know, but just last week I was re-reading a set of novels that I had last read as a teenager, and in one book I found one of my hairs.
My hair was long and bleached back then, so it was fun to compare it to my very short and darker hair now. It was also neat to think “Hey! This is a piece of me from 20 years ago.”
I also found a bookmark on which I’d scribbled down the telephone numbers of two of my old high school friends.
I’ve got at least 30 more books to go in this series (Michael Moorcock’s “Multiverse”: Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon, Cornelius, Bastable, Von Bek etc.) so who knows what else I’ll find.
Years ago I took a class is electrical design. I bought a used book for the class. In this book I found a piece of paper that appeared to be answers to an exam. I did okay in the class. The final was an open book exam. It took a few minutes to realize the piece of paper I found was the answers to this exam.
Needless to say I did very well on the exam. And it bumped up my final grade up a bunch.
Satisfied? 
Well, I won’t be making that statement again! 
Love that site Shadez but Facebook says it is coming up “spammy” and won’t let me share it.
Okay- my own thread drift. I mentioned the old bible above in post #1.
Following on from the site told to us by Shadez, I decided to look a bit futher. The Bible has in it a piece of tapestry resembling a waist band that my partner tells me could have been worn by an Altar Boy. Only the front half remains but it has embroidered on it “God is good to those who seek him” In English (say that as the owners appear to be of Swedish descent).
Inside the front cover of the Bible is an inscription “Presented to XXX by the teachers of Lady ??? School 4th October 1865”. Again very nice handwriting and it is in English- because of the age it is a little difficult to discern.
There are also two lines that seem to have been erased or covered.
The Bible contains (apart from stacks of pressed leaves) a small card devoted to King Carl the XV of Sweden who it seems was alive between 1826 and 1872.
The Bible was printed in MDCCCLXII. (1862)
In the back page of the Bible are a series of annotations of births and baptisms in Cooktown, Qld to a Swedish (possibly) family starting in 1874.
Cooktown at that time would have been very small- a real back water. I may contact them and see if they have any history of the family or the school. The school does not appear on any searches.
My wife and I were scouring Half Price Books (in Austin) years ago. She’d never read So Long and Thanks for all the Fish by Douglas Adams and wanted to pick up a copy. She opened up the very first one and said, “Oh my god, Todd, come take a look at this.”
Inside the front cover was written, “To Todd, Best Wishes, Douglas Adams”. :eek:
A few years later we got him to sign it again (after explaining the story behind it), so now it also says, “And again, Douglas Adams”.
Very cool. I wonder if I know the person who runs that site. I collect first editions and have come across a few things in the books I have acquired:
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I had a first edition of House at Pooh Corner and while inspecting it, a loose page fell out - an ad for the 1929(?) Winnie the Pooh calendar offered by the publisher.
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I found a first edition of an Aldous Huxley book - not one of his main titles - and found a bookplate from famous Hollywood director George Cukor in it.
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I bought a signed first edition of Last Exit to Brooklyn, and a postcard ad for a reading and book signing to announce the publishing of the book fell out (obviously where the book got signed)…
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I got a copy of Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There and realized it had an ownership sig in the upper corner of the ffep (front free end paper) of Dominick Dunne, the Hollywood/murder-trial chronicaller. I wrote him care of Vanity Fair and he wrote back confirming it was likely his - and yeah, the signatures matched.
I have a few that came with ephemera (the collector’s catch-all name for stuff included with books). With Review Copies, they are first editions with ephemera included like a letter from the publisher, a photo or two, etc. - sent to influential readers. I have a first edition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X with a Review Copy letter addressed to FDR’s son, congressman James Roosevelt. And I have a first U.S. edition of Joyce’s Ulysses with a form-letter from the publisher - and a great photo of Joyce with an eyepatch, that says at the bottom “now available complete and unexpurgated!” so the photo was clearly part of the Review Copy materials. Cool stuff.
Once I got a Polish bill or some sort, worthless, but cool nonetheless…
another time I got copies of an 80 year old woman’s hip X-ray.
both from the library.
In college, I found a train ticket to Boston from somewhere else in NE from the 30s in a used book.
so nothing of any real interest…
'course now i’m inspired and i’ll be leaving snowflakes in the library books that i have with me here at work…
Found a condom (still in its sealed wrapper!!!) in a library book I was browsing once. Ick.
No, I didn’t check out the book. This was several years ago and it’s possible the damn thing is still there.
I bought a book at my local used book store titled Black Box. It was a compendium of cockpit voice recordings of crews on doomed airliners reciting their efforts to save their planes from imminent crashes, unsuccessfully.
Inside the book was a ticket stub for a flight from LA to Vegas back in 1990. Did this guy actually bring a book of airline disasters along on his flight? Looks that way.
I have an 1800s school book that has several teenage love letters from the era pressed inside. Very chaste stuff, and all one sided (it’s a boy writing a girl, so the book must have been the girl’s… somewhere, someone has the boy’s book and has the responses). The best thing, though, is the handwriting. My God, the handwriting is gorgeous, above what I see from professional calligraphers. The book also has a report card-type missive, as well as other letters, and the handwriting is different but still beautiful. I felt like a moron when I was perusing this book at 10 years old, struggling with the crappy writing touted by whatever cursive system A Beka Book was ripping off. I feel like a moron now when I can’t even sign my own name legibly, though I’m vindicated when I switch to perfunctory cursive in math classes to denote functions and such, and classmates express surprise that I can write in ‘italics’…
Kinda does/kinda doesn’t fit the thread theme: I recall a friend’s childhood birthday where he was presented with a trivia book, a chemistry kit, and other geeky gifts, which was fine since we were geeks. We were young, he threw a tantrum about getting “just” a book from whomever had given it, then took to the chemistry set to begin trying some of the experiments. While he was occupied, I picked up the book and began reading it, and discovered that his grandparents had stuck $10 bills throughout, probably $200 in all… a lot for the late 1970s, especially for a kid under the age of 10. I remember looking up and realizing the adults were concerned, since I knew the secret, and he didn’t. I watched as he played with his chemicals, waited until he was tired, and really suggested that he look through the book, then acting surprised when money began falling out. It was one of my first “adult” moments as a kid; picking up on the social cues around me, not taking advantage of the situation, and fixing the situation without taking credit, etc.
Actually, ephemera is stuff that was made with the expectation that nobody would keep it for any amount of time. For instance, a few people might keep a scorecard from a game of miniature golf, but the things are printed up with the expectation that just about everyone will throw them away after using them. Photos and letters and postcards and movie posters and takeout menus are considered paper ephemera, and one of the local booksellers’ conventions also includes paper ephemera.
Ephemera is not necessarily book related.
I think I read that book when it was re-released under the title OH SHI-.
Seriously, though, it’s morbid but I can see someone doing that as some sort of reverse-psychology anti-anxiety thingie.
As for me, I once checked out a copy of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity from the undergraduate library, and found someone had gone through with a ball point pen and wrote his or her strong objections to Mr. Lewis’s assertions, in the margins of nearly every other page.