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.
There’s a small subset of pictures that are just baffling as to WHY anyone thought using it as a bookmark was a good idea. Many of the bad red eye pictures involve drunken antics which are embarassing at best, criminal at worst. And then there’s the people that include nude snapshots… some of those have been rather charming in their candidness with the subject smiling and attempting to strike a pinup style pose for the photographer, gazing at them with obvious love and affection. But why did it end up tossed away in a book then? Then there’s been some that well… can I buy bleach for my brain?
Whole BOXES of books often contain even stranger items. If they were carried in, the owner will usually quickly reclaim the stray DVDs, CDs, puzzles, clothes, toys, etc that were destined for donation and ended up accidentally in the box with the books. It is the ones that leave the box outside the door when you’re closed that usually contain the strangest items: clothing, electronics, toys, glassware and other things that make you wonder why the hell they ever thought dropping them in front of a bookshop made ANY sense. And that brings us to the picture at the top of the post: the gun.
It was dropped off in a box left on my porch. It was mostly books with a few little carved wooden animals thrown in as well. I went to pick up the last box and wondered why it weighed even more than usual… Upon opening it, there was the gun and a 5 pound container of BBs. No wonder the box weighed a ton! Upon further inspection it turned out the gun was A) loaded B) had the safety off. BB pistols are perfectly legal to own in my state with no license required, so didn’t bothering calling the cops. However it did get unloaded and have the safety put on before being passed on to a friend that had a use for a BB pistol.
Barring getting a live animal, I think nothing will top the gun. But if I DO get a kitten left on my doorstep, I would not be terribly surprised…
You win! I don’t think we have anything that tops a gun for amazing-things-found-in-boxes. Although we did find a black widow spider in a box once at a library sale set-up. I made a shrieky yelpy sound, I am told, but that was because I think I actually touched it. This same library used to have a box of odd things they have retrieved from books, and this included a plastic wrapper from a hamburger package with the red/brown stain inside. They had also found at some point a wedding certificate and a banana peel, neither of which ended up in the box. Yesterday a customer found a dollar in a Dan Brown book and insisted on giving it to us. And once we found a perfume card from a hundred years ago in a book. It was worth a lot more than the book.
This is fun part of the used book business. I am greatful I never found a nude photo of anyone.
I love finding old tram tickets; they are small and fragile but turn up occassionally. They are quite collectible here. I also found a letter signed by H V Morton, in a book by H V Morton
Therese
Once at a yard sale, as I was perusing a box of books and asked, “How much are the books?”, I spotted one with an envelope peeking out. As the man, whose yard and book it was, replied, “$1.00 each.” I pulled out the book with the envelope, then the envelope from the book and asked, “Does that include whatever is in this envelope?”
He quickly came over, I handed him the envelope and he opened it to find old, defunct credit cards, a couple receipts, and $150.00 cash. At this point he said, “My ex-wife must have put it there. This is more than I’ve made all day selling stuff. Thanks for your honesty. You can have the box of books.”
The envelope contained a lot more than the books were worth too.
My best was inside box of books picked up at a Church sale. I bought a few boxes of paperbacks just to fill in our sci-fi section. One of the books had a nice crisp $50 stuck in it. I thought it would be near impossible to find the owner so into the till it went. Guilt was not an issue as we have donated thousands of books to this church over the years.
– Almost forgot we also found a matching set of gold wedding rings that were inside a donated box of books (again, had no idea who the owner was).
Our favorite is always money. It’s definitely more rare though. One time we found 4 crisp $100 bills inside a card inside a book. We buy in bulk though and had no idea who it originally came from. We’ve found a few stray $1 bills and a $5 here or there, but the $100’s definitely topped the list. We get tons of pictures and reciepts, postcards, letters, flowers, leaves, bookmarks of course, paperclips, string, ribbon, wrapping paper, the list goes on and on.
One time we found several boxes of books inscribed by various authors to Senator Barack Obama. Some had notes written inside the books and some had entire letters tucked in the book. This was just a few months before he became president and there was one binder of campaign literature. We put them in an eBay auction and a memorabilia company in Oklahoma ended up with them. For a lot less than I had hoped too – I probably should have waited until after the elections, but I was afraid that if I waited and he lost they wouldn’t be worth much….
Even as a little boy, I would often dream of picking up an old library book and find a map with directions to a pirate’s buried treasure hoard. Reading too many Enid Blyton’s mystery books can do that to a kid’s mind!! Perhaps that was one reason that I spent more time in a library/bookstore than other boys my age!! Of course, there were many more girls in the library than outside it!:)
I now have a used bookstore in Kuwait City. A few weeks ago I found a crisp 10 KD note (about 35 US$) inside one of the books that I was sorting out. That was encouraging. So I spent the next 2 hours reefing through all the books that came in that lot. Came up with notes, ticket stubs, photographs, bookmarks, etc.. but no more cash nor that elusive treasure map which I still wish for!!
Almost a year ago, I recommended a book to a customer of mine to read. He picked it off the shelf and when he opened it he found 4000 Pakistani Rupees (about 80 US$ or so). He politely handed it to me but I told him “finder’s keepers”. He was thrilled. My sales pitch at the store now is “Shop here. You could even find money”.
We have also found the ubiquitous credit card receipts, boarding passes, and book marks along with the other odds and ends. However, the most surprising photo we found in a book was a woman in a pornographic pose that had a personal message to an apparent boyfriend. However, the most curious book mark we have found was a large piece of crab grass.
Reading this article I felf compelled to write relating the time I was called into a “grand” old hall in Norfolk England to view a library that had a lot of history and related to the Walpole family. I opened a small thin book on a scientific theme about 1730 and out of the book dropped a perfectly preserved and almost fossilised “fried egg”. it bounced once on my shoe and partly rolled away and the “blue yolk” exploded in a shower of technicolor spores.
I had to imagine WHY?
I came to the conclusion the Lord of the Manor house was eating breakfast in bed, he got disturbed and looking for a book mark decided the only thing to hand was the almost uneaten egg on his breakfast plate, so in he popped it, closed the book and then for some other inexplicable reason, forgot! Eighty years later, I stroll in find his unfinished breakfast lurking in ambush. The book was damaged and the pages buckled slightly and the book was a $1000+ book. I didn’t get the books, due to leaving a mess! And I have never found any money in a book in 40 years.