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

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

#22

> 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 significa…

> The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars

The article does not say that or anything remotely similar.

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

#24
I wrote about this once before, but I had a very similar situation, except with family photos instead of books. The story was that someone's apartment was cleared out after they were evicted. Well, after a few years of the stuff sitting in storage, I got around to looking through it, and with a bit of sleuthing, I tracked down the person who the family photos belonged to and gave them a call.

The call did not go well. It is certainly possible that I could have approached the phone call better, and maybe I should have tried harder, but they were suspicious, rude, and quite possibly upset. So I never took the family photos to them, and eventually disposed of them.

You really never know how people will respond to having their past thrust at them like this. Or how they'll respond to strange phone calls.

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

#25
Yesterday heard an NPR story on a similar topic - A librarian collects all the things left in books — from love letters to old photos -- https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1114851706

The WaPo article - Librarian finds love notes, doodles in books and shares them with a grateful public -- https://wapo.st/3SjGKNv

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

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 significa…

> The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars The article does not say that or anything remotely similar.

Quoting:

> ... I looked through some of the books in the top boxes and realized that there were some very old, and often valuable, books in this boxes.

You're right that this isn't saying that the books were definitely worth a lot of money, so it really say something remotely similar.

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

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars The article does not say that or anything remotely similar.

Quoting: > ... I looked through some of the books in the top boxes and realized that there were some very old, and often valuable, books in this boxes. You're right that this isn't saying that the books were definitely worth a lot of money, so it really say something remotely similar.

That's a far stretch to "tens of thousands of dollars." A valuable second-hand book can be $50.
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