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Inside I found a handwritten note from a 14 year old boy which said something to the effect of "If you like stuff like this, call me!" So I did! We ended up being friends for a couple years and exchanging C64 software and talking about nerd stuff.
I bought a Ti-92 graphing calculator in the early 2000's for very cheap, couple dollars, secondhand. I found this odd because at the time they still went for a lot of money. Inside the very large battery door[1] I found a person's name and phone number. I thought about contacting them to see if it was stolen, but first I googled the name and found a several month old local news article about the person dying in a hel…
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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.
At one point it was hard to get and were selling for $700 - they are now $50.
Had a friend find a bunch of $100 bills in a used book in Salvation Army in SF...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Similarly, I'm looking for the complete Collected Works of Carl Jung, and that's got a hefty price too. Maybe one day. :)
I'm sure both of these examples are sitting in some old man's study and are getting sold for nothing at estate sales, if they aren't just thrown in a dumpster or pulped after being donated to a library that can't get rid of them either. But nobody is indexing estate sales.
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You lived the Half Blood Prince!
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.
Same as good class hand notes from students, that get (or used to get) photocopied and handed down through the years to new students...
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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…
What happened if you ordered the books only after the first day of class?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I once took a critical thinking course and bought the textbook 2nd hand from the college bookstore. A week or two in, I noticed half of a sentence written in the margin. As the professor started teaching the topic from that page, he rhetorically asked a question, did not get an answer, and then answered himself with the sentence from the book. I filliped ahead and found that the entire book was annotated with all of…
I hope you didn't cast any random spells scrawled in your Advanced Potion-Making book. Sectumsempra is a nono, I hear.
The cold in the room seemed to deepen. “A sixth-year Gryffindor cast a curse at one of my more promising students, a sixth-year Slytherin.”
Harry swallowed. “What...sort of curse?”
And the fury on Professor Quirrell’s face was no longer contained. “Why bother to ask an unimportant question like that, Mr Potter? Our friend the sixth-year Gryffindor did not think it was important!”
“Are you serious?” Harry said before he could stop himself.
“No, I’m in a terrible mood today for no particular reason. Yes I’m serious, you fool! He didn’t know. He actually didn’t know. I didn’t believe it until the Aurors confirmed it under Veritaserum. He is in his sixth year at Hogwarts and he cast a high-level Dark curse without knowing what it did.”
“You don’t mean,” Harry said, “that he was mistaken about what it did, that he somehow read the wrong spell description—”
“All he knew was that it was meant to be directed at an enemy. He knew that was all he knew.”
And that had been enough to cast the spell. “I do not understand how anything with that small a brain could walk upright.”
“Indeed, Mr Potter,” said Professor Quirrell.
There was a pause. Professor Quirrell leaned forward and picked up the silver inkwell from his desk, turning it around in his hands, staring at it as though wondering how he could go about torturing an inkwell to death.
“Was the sixth-year Slytherin seriously hurt?” said Harry.
“Yes.”
“Was the sixth-year Gryffindor raised by Muggles?”
“Yes.”
“Is Dumbledore refusing to expel him because the poor boy didn’t know?”
Professor Quirrell’s hands whitened on the inkwell. “Do you have a point, Mr Potter, or are you just stating the obvious?”
“Professor Quirrell,” said Harry gravely, “all the Muggle-raised students in Hogwarts need a safety lecture in which they are told the things so ridiculously obvious that no wizardborn would ever think to mention them. Don’t cast curses if you don’t know what they do, if you discover something dangerous don’t tell the world about it, don’t brew high-level potions without supervision in a bathroom, the reason why there are underage magic laws, all the basics.”