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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?

#131

Post by tomcam »

1. I bought a 500 year-old book full of engravings that turned out to have pictures of UFOs in it

2. I became obsessed with Luna Park, an influential proto-Disneyland based in Coney Island 100+ years ago. It was so popular they ran light rail out there and hundreds of thousands of people went there every weekend until it burned down about a decade later. Took a book about it on vacation to Paris. Went to a random place to read, and it had a little concourse named Luna Park. Inside it was a random coin-op machine named Luna Park, not related to the concourse from what I could tell.

3. I was studying songs by the lyricist Jule Stein, a New Yorker. One day I went into a used bookshop on the other side of the country in Newport Beach, CA just to browse. I found a bunch of books with his bookplate in them. (Nothing musical, sadly.)

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

#133

Post by gostsamo »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #129
gostsamo wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I read HPMOR and this paragraph was one of many delights there: 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 Gryffind…

Do you recommend HMOR? I’ve never heard of it, but the Wikipedia page sounded interesting

Definitely. I might not always agree with the author, but reading it is like having an intelligent and funny conversation.

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

#134

Post by galago »

karmelapple wrote: post #121

A bar I frequented had books on every shelf on every wall. When visiting I usually wouldn't touch them, but once in awhile after a beverage I'd grab a random one and peek inside. One I opened had on the inside cover someone's full name and social security number. I brought it up to the bartender so they could rip out that page and throw it away. Was there a time when putting your SSN inside a book was common?

In the 1930s there was no real reason to keep it secret. Tattoos:

https://minarchist.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/social-security-...

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

#135

Post by computator »

In the late 1990s, after watching the movie WarGames (1983), I saw a scene where Matthew Broderick's character is researching the computer scientist Stephen Falken to try to guess his password. There was a brief glimpse of a Scientific American magazine cover[1] titled "Falken's maze: Teaching a machine to learn". That sounded fascinating and I went to the university library to find that issue of Scientific American in bound periodicals. As you have likely already guessed, it turned out that the cover had been faked for the movie and that the actual cover was something completely different. But someone had handwritten on the cover page: "I bet you were looking for Falken's maze!"

[1] https://www.mscroggs.co.uk/blog/tags/books (halfway down has a photo of the Scientific American issue)

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

#137

Post by GloriousKoji »

moron4hire wrote: post #100
trebbble wrote: post #88

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…

They go through some pretty extreme lengths to get you to waste money on buying books from them. The English classes my university published a new "reader textbook" ever quarter. It was just a crappy bounded letter paper book with section from various novels that they change up every quarter so you couldn't use an old one. The on campus copy center and nearby kinkos/staples/officemax/officedepot wouldn't photocopy it but a half hour drive out would reach stores that didn't care. A photocopy costed about 1/5 of the price the university was selling it at.

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

#138

Post by CamperBob2 »

IshKebab wrote: post #38
gameshot911 wrote: post #36

How about an IP address[1]? [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/wf3e99/r...

Not very strange. Someone just pasted at the wrong point and didn't notice.

Normally an editor would catch that, but I think they've all departed for the Grey Havens. [1]

1: https://i.imgur.com/pevfen5.png

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

#139

Post by em-bee »

tomcam wrote: post #131

1. I bought a 500 year-old book full of engravings that turned out to have pictures of UFOs in it 2. I became obsessed with Luna Park, an influential proto-Disneyland based in Coney Island 100+ years ago. It was so popular they ran light rail out there and hundreds of thousands of people went there every weekend until it burned down about a decade later. Took a book about it on vacation to Paris. Went to a random pla…

* I bought a 500 year-old book full of engravings that turned out to have pictures of UFOs in it*

which book is that? do you have photos?

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

#140

Post by pugworthy »

I have some old (1800's) student primers (textbooks) which I value for the doodles and illustrations past owners have done.

Perhaps the most fascinating is a drawing of an early steamship with smokestack and paddle wheels, but also masts for sails. This style of ship didn't exist for that long, and some student long ago must have seen them and been fascinated by them enough to make the drawing in the book.

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