101–110 of 481 posts
I found an advertisement for cigarettes in the middle of Creatures of Light and Darkness.
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…
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. I've bought many books over the years that had prior owner's names marked inside somewhere. On a few occasions I've bothered to try and identify/find the person in question. Once or twice I was successful, but I never bothered contacting them just to say "Hey, I bought this book…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That element of the Half-Blood Prince was taken from real life. Used textbooks have been preferred by students for precisely for this reason (well, cost too, but this is a well-known benefit) in colleges since... well, probably since textbooks have existed.
Halfway through my college experience (around 2002 or so), the university started putting up blinders in the bookstore while they stocked shelves and wouldn't let you buy your books until basically the first day of class, specifically in an attempt to stymie students finding their books, looking them up, and buying them at 1/10th the price online. I mean, it wasn't my first experience with the university prioritizing…
Localhost ip address has to be one of the strangest things ever found in a book. https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/wf3e99/r...
I realize it is not the same as finding a friend, but I recently found five crisp $20 bills in a used logic text book at an Amvets thrift store. I opened the book because it was written by Irving Copi, who wrote my undergrad logic text. I was paranoid it was counterfeit, but it was very much real money. To make things better, the first $20 I spent was to get a pizza and the employee said a mistake happened at the piz…
Trouble is, luck is conserved. That's why you got COVID and a tax audit and three cavities at your next dental exam. At least that's what I tell myself when someone randomly finds $100 in a book...
> 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…
Hi Katie, we should meet up over tea over these images. The first image should be a simple sketch of two dudes playing football, tell the guys in graphics that the one they gave me is waaa too complex. The second image should be a chick playing tennis.
The note went on in this manner for a couple more sentences, describing all the images on the page. Because I was a blind student who used a screen reader, I had to get the PDF version from the publishing company, which I then put in a specialized ebook reading app for the blind. I strongly suspect that the editors of that book used some PDF tricks for hiding information to post notes to each other. Whether they were alt descriptions, white fonts on white background, regions shrunk to be 1px tall by 1px wide or something else entirely, I do not know. That file was intended for printing, not digital distribution, so I guess that they decided the notes didn't need removing as long as they weren't visible.
Dozens of leaves from different kinds of trees, pressed between the pages. I found it at a yardsale. Apparently collecting leaves and flowers like this is a hobby.