Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

noctslackv2.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 481 posts

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#11

Post by r00fus »

RajT88 wrote: post #9

I am not trolling here, just for posterity. =) I once bought about a dozen Doctor Who paperbacks at a garage sale. This was probably 1995. Half of them contained mysterious hand-written notes which related to "keys". Cryptic sentences on each paper like, "The fifth key is hard to find, and has many chilly neighbors". To this day, I have no idea what it was about. Maybe the books and notes are on a shelf at my parent'…

Sounds like something my kids would do to keep each other entertained on a long trip to see family. Perhaps it's just a treasure hunt?

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#13

Post by ColinWright »

Jtsummers wrote: post #8
ColinWright wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling @dang ... (URLs can't be edited by non-admins like me)

Assuming you submitted the actual URL, it's a canonical link problem: That's the canonical link in the page, which points to nothing. Which I'd guess HN rewrites as just the root (what is currently being pointed to).

I used the bookmarklet, and it's plausible that I was, at the time, viewing the blog root page (as linked here) rather than drilling down to the permalink.

So it's likely to have been my mistake.

Edit: I've emailed the mods.

Edit2: It's been fixed.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#14

Post by spywaregorilla »

> He looked around at the faces in the crowd and said, “I’m opening the bidding at one dollar.” I about shit myself. I bid the $1 immediately to get things rolling. Well, after I bid, he looked around and said, “Once, twice, sold that man there for $1.” I just laughed… and wondered how the Hell I was going to get this pallet home and what I was going to do with all those books.

> When I asked the auctioneer afterwards why he’d let it go so cheaply, he said, “Did you see anyone trampling you to get in a bid?” I said no, I didn’t. His reply, with a smirk on his face, was, “Gotta’ know your audience in this job.”

> Well, needless to say, I got the books home and spent a few years going through them and selling some, giving some away, etc. However, that’s not the point of this story. The point was finding things in books. So, with that in mind…

Dude goes to an auction and finds books. Nobody bids on the books. Dude is amazed that the auctioneer is willing to sell him something nobody wants for a low price. Dude spends years going through those books.

I'm happy for this guy.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#15

Post by ColinWright »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #14

> He looked around at the faces in the crowd and said, “I’m opening the bidding at one dollar.” I about shit myself. I bid the $1 immediately to get things rolling. Well, after I bid, he looked around and said, “Once, twice, sold that man there for $1.” I just laughed… and wondered how the Hell I was going to get this pallet home and what I was going to do with all those books. > When I asked the auctioneer afterward…

Your summary is kinda accurate, but I can't help but feel that you've missed the point completely.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#16

Post by motoboi »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #14

> He looked around at the faces in the crowd and said, “I’m opening the bidding at one dollar.” I about shit myself. I bid the $1 immediately to get things rolling. Well, after I bid, he looked around and said, “Once, twice, sold that man there for $1.” I just laughed… and wondered how the Hell I was going to get this pallet home and what I was going to do with all those books. > When I asked the auctioneer afterward…

Dude found friend.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#18

Post by coldblues »

There's a lot of people you can randomly encounter, especially on the internet, if you're curious enough to wander around in the vast series of tubes. I always go around like a creep clicking on various links, finding people's websites and profiles, and joining their groups or sending them a message. A lot of interesting people that I've even made friends with, I have encountered this way, and I have many tales to tell.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#19

Post by spywaregorilla »

ColinWright wrote: post #15
spywaregorilla wrote: post #14

> He looked around at the faces in the crowd and said, “I’m opening the bidding at one dollar.” I about shit myself. I bid the $1 immediately to get things rolling. Well, after I bid, he looked around and said, “Once, twice, sold that man there for $1.” I just laughed… and wondered how the Hell I was going to get this pallet home and what I was going to do with all those books. > When I asked the auctioneer afterward…

Your summary is kinda accurate, but I can't help but feel that you've missed the point completely.

It's not the point, it's just the part of it I enjoyed

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#20

Post by jacobolus »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #14

> He looked around at the faces in the crowd and said, “I’m opening the bidding at one dollar.” I about shit myself. I bid the $1 immediately to get things rolling. Well, after I bid, he looked around and said, “Once, twice, sold that man there for $1.” I just laughed… and wondered how the Hell I was going to get this pallet home and what I was going to do with all those books. > When I asked the auctioneer afterward…

The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars (sold individually on the second-hand book market, after being carefully catalogued etc.), but nobody interested in buying books happened to be at the auction and the auctioneer set a $1 minimum bid because he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. The auction house could surely get significantly more for their books if they knew the right venue to sell them (somewhere frequented by used booksellers), but I guess it wasn’t worth their trouble to figure out where that might be.

This is sort of like the time I went to a car auction as a kid and some college students bought a lightly used stretch limo in perfect working order for (the minimum bid of) $100.

Post reply on HN