As in, papers/photos stashed by strangers in used books that you purchased, or that you put in a book and forgot until much later.
As a consequence of a major bookshelf reorganization/book purge today, I found lying on the floor (it had evidently fallen out of one of the books) a check for $260.76, issued in 1988 by an insurance company, payable to an individual and an auto glass company.
Most likely the check was reissued and the books have been balanced on this one long ago, and I’m not especially inclined to track down the issuees.
This was one of the odder things we’ve found in used books in addition to other people’s credit card receipts, postcards, cryptic notes and shopping lists etc.
Any good ones/mysteries from your book collection?
while traveling through California as a 13 yr old with my parents, we stopped in Fresno at some strip mall or other. I popped into the used book store that was there and grabbed an edition of “Stranger In A Strange Land” out of a box the proprietor was sorting through, so as to have something to read on the trip back to our home state. Apparently that book hadn’t been sorted very well yet. About a third of the way through reading it, a $20 bill fell out. I guess not weird, but certainly an unexpected and welcome windfall-return on a 50¢ entertainment investment.
Or maybe weird because money is not what I would have expected to find in that book
I found a folded marriage license in a book I bought at a yard sale. I remembered the house that had conducted the sale and tried to return it to them. They had bought the book used and had no idea who the people on the license were.
This was long before the internet, or I might have tried to find the couple to return their kicense. Instead, I trusted serendipity and left it in the book where I found it. I eventually sold the book myself in a yard sale, but no one contacted me about it.
This stretches the meaning of “found in” a book, but several years back there was a specific general audience science book I had been watching sites for a good deal on a used copy of. Eventually, a hardback copy pops for $8.00, half or less the price of the next cheapest copy, and I bought it. When it arrived, I saw that there was a page of writing on one of the blank front pages of the book, which mildly annoyed me–until I noticed that the writing was a heartfelt message from the scientist who was the author of the book to the aunts who had raised him, wanting to see some of what he had accomplished in life.
I was going through an old photo album from our family and spotted something I had not seen before. Tucked in the spine in the black pages was a small negative which also appeared black. I held it up to the light and actually shouted out loud. It was a closeup of my grandfather’s panel truck and showed the signage on the side. Beside the truck was my aunt and uncle in 1943 (both still OK).
This cascaded as I could now identify the truck (a 1938 American Bantam panel delivery). It also appeared in other photos I already had, but too far away and at other angles so I could not recognize it. So I could date those other photos nicely.
Now that I knew the vehicle, asking the aunt and uncle brought out a bunch of stories about it. I even found the ad in the Elyria Chronicle Telegram when grandfather sold it.
Then, after a tedious search around Elyria, Ohio to ID the buildings in the background, I realized the photo had been shot in the front yard of the old family home, now the site of a school. This positively identified a bunch more photos as being in front of the house, but facing away.
The story was so interesting I submitted it to my friend’s local history blog, here it is:
Many years ago, one of my hippy friends gave me a gift to read on a long car trip my family was taking-- I was in high school, and he was one of the “older kids” we sometimes smoked weed with. It was On the Road, and when I got to the end of it, I realized it was a library book he had stolen.
One of my buddies once loaned me a very serious non-fiction book (physics related) and he had forgotten that he had stored some “sexy pics” he had taken of himself for this girlfriend. There was even some “sexy notes” to her on the back. I never told him about it, and assumed he didn’t know. Figured it was best not discussed. It was a bit tame-- just bare chested pics with muscles flexed, but I didn’t want to embarrass him to letting him know I saw them, especially with the sappy notes on the back.
My dad recently gave me some books, mostly philosophy and classic literature, for my online resale business. One of them contained a syllabus and some notes from a master’s level class he took when I was a baby, something I never knew he’d done. I told him about it, and he said he wanted them back (never mind that he probably hadn’t looked at or thought about them in over 50 years!). I said, “Too late, I already recycled them.” (True.)
I also inspect donated books for my local library’s bookstore, and the two strangest things I’ve found to date were mammogram results from 2006 (they were OK ) and a photograph of a young man wearing a fluorescent wig and a halter top with balloons in it.
Also at the library, someone donated an encyclopedia about magic and the occult that we ended up selling on Amazon for $300. In one volume was a booklet about an event that we thought inspired “The Exorcist” but we found out later didn’t; anyway, the booklet is still in print, published by a Catholic press, but this particular printing was worth about $40. IDK if we’ve sold that one yet.
When I lived in my old town, I also inspected donations for the library’s booksale, and found enough photographs and other potential memorabilia (including ticket stubs from a relatively recent Olympics) that I got a poster board and scrapbook adhesive, mounted them, and put it up in a prominent area with a note along the lines of “Do you know these people/are these yours?” IIRC, we did get a couple of takers.
I went through a 140-year old family Bible. Pressed flowers, tiny printed cards with scripture (Sunday school stuff), political ad for Governor of Oklahoma 1914, pink ribbon faded to white, label from canned salmon 1920s, and a photo of my Great Grandmother’s third husband taken in the 1940s.
Most of the books I buy are used books, but still nothing very remarkable to report here. I found a pair of 1989 tickets to a Tigers game once. Another time, I found a really REALLY bad report card in what must have been a book intended for a high school English lit class. I can’t count the number of times I’ve found loose recipes tucked amid the pages of cookbooks.
I sort book donations for the local library. The only money I ever found was a twenty dollar bill in a bar mitzvah card. I have found bookmarks from stores all around the country.
I buy lots of books second-hand, so finding interesting items in them is a fairly common occurence for me.
About 10 years ago, I found a cinema ticket for The Hunt for Red October dated to the Summer of 1990 in a book about Athenian society at the time of Pericles. I waxed nostalgic trying to remember what I was doing when the unknown previous owner saw that movie. I also got a kick out of trying to picture someone who was curious about both Greek Antiquity and Cold War films.
But there’s a note that depressed me a little and I might have posted about it before. On the inside cover of a paperback that I browsed, someone had written : “To my dear…, whom I love very much” or words to that effect. From the wording, it didn’t feel like a “romantic” message more like an older male relative (grandfather, uncle…) writing to a younger girl. It was sweet and all… but then I started wondering how such a presumably valuable book ended up in a thrift shop.
I lent a coworker one of my textbooks. It wasn’t something I used often at all and didn’t miss it until I remembered a few years later and asked for it back. When I got it back, one of his paychecks from around the time he borrowed it was inside. In those days he spent very little money and never noticed that he hadn’t cashed the check.
We bought an old family library ages ago (just under 10 tons in one shot) that had, over the generations, come down to one person. One of the great-uncles back around 1870-1900 was something of a hider. We found coins and bills and some assorted trinkets hidden in the spines of the farming/nature books that had been his personal collection within this hoard. I found out from a friend who deals in old books that it isn’t terribly unusual and he always checks stuff coming from the estates of pre-FDIC people.
“A few years ago I bought Dan Rather’s 1977 autobiography, The Camera Never Blinks, at a used book store. Inside it, there was a little paper sleeve with the ESPN logo. The sleeve held an airplane boarding pass and a hotel receipt from 1998 for Mike Adamle, who used to broadcast football games for the network and who was also a commentator on American Gladiators. The hotel receipt also has Sean Salisbury’s name on it (apparently they traveled together). Salisbury was a former NFL quarterback who became another ESPN commentator. He later became infamous for being fired from ESPN for sexual harassment.”
In my high school physics book (which the school provided for students), was a pin-up style picture of one of the cheerleaders who was a few years ahead of me, obviously taken by a student in the school yearbook club and developed in the school’s photo lab. On the back was “I hope this makes your year go faster”. It was a pretty evocative picture for a 16-year boy to find unexpectedly.
