Oh the tales that can be told of the interesting things found in books… and I don’t mean the words! People use a wide array of things as bookmarks, including some things that you really question WHY they thought this was a good idea. There’s three things that I find most commonly in books besides bookmarks: photographs, boarding passes, and credit card receipts. The credit card receipts are slowly fading away as knucklebuster credit card machines disappear, but they were easily the most common thing I saw for a long time. Giving me the receipt with your credit card number on it just seems like a bad idea…
Boarding passes are fairly self explanatory. They grabbed a book on the way on and then stuck the boarding pass of ticket stubs in the book. Airplane passes are the most common. I occasionally see train stubs, but usually the serious commuters have a rail pass and aren’t buying individual tickets. Every now and then I’ll see ferry tickets, but they’re rare.
Photographs are also very common, but like the credit card receipts are fading away. Photographs usually fall into three categories: everyone has red eye, a slightly blurry picture of a dog, or a child being frightened at Disney World. You’d think there couldn’t possibly be THAT many pictures of people being frightened on vacation, but probably about 20% of the photos I find show a kid crying their eyes out at Disney World or Disney Land. You can tell the location by the background architecture. Ones actually showing the kid fleeing in terror from Mickey Mouse are a bit rarer since its the sort of thing parents keep to torment their grown children with.