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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?

#161

Post by mutation »

A few years ago I got some books for free from a second-hand bookstore here in Zagreb, Croatia, where I live. One of those was a Real World OCaml book with a dedication from Jane Street Team to someone named Gustav. There were also some other books about functional programming given for free. I guess Gustav decided functional progamming wasn't for him, and just dumped those books to the first bookstore he could find.

Also, a few years back, I borrowed The Agebraist by Iain M. Banks from a local library and found his signature in there on the title page.

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

#162

Post by thesimonlee »

Latin for Lawyers 2nd edition seems to be based on E. Hilton Jackson ( a lawyer) & Broom's Legal Maxims published 1937, sweet & maxwell

(Book was from ebay, unread condition) Pasted inside front cover -

This book is a typical text excercise book from the years between the two world wars! It is almost useless in imparting any understanding of the subject. Almost all books on any subject tended to be like this and students often had to battle to make sense of incomprehendible texts. Even with the help of of a tutor it is difficult to see how anyone could follow it. Anyone trying to use it alone would entirely be lost and confused. There is no account of how to use it, no help with following the numbering system, and above all no ANSWERS! Even someone with a school grounding in Latin would have difficulty.

It is a fine example of the dry, pedantic and often unhelpful attitude of the time in the teaching profession where simple facts were often presented in an unnecessarily convoluted way, simply it seems because this was the academic fashion This habit only died out after WWII It has a parallel in the Victorian.habit of giving quite ordinary toys elaborate Greek names, such as the Phenakistoscope!

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

#163

Post by merlyn »

GloriousKoji wrote: post #137
moron4hire wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Years ago at the university, we had to buy straightup photocopies of articles and such out of books/magazines/whatever that the class would be taught off of at the campus bookstore at prices much higher than per-page copy.

Something about paying the source for licensing and distribution was the reason given.

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

#164

Post by Lio »

I have nothing constructive to say except how much I enjoyed reading this.

Ild books are magic. If you find the right one going for a song it’s like a gateway somewhere.

I also love old maps, particularly Ordinance Survey ones. Wonderful things.

Weirdest thing I’ve found in an old book? Squashed dead spider with the legs splayed out. Perfectly desiccated. :P

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

#165

Post by kyleblarson »

ortusdux wrote: post #78

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 took an intro econ course in college in 1999. The professor gave us his past tests to use as practice and some of them dated back to the late 1950's.

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

#166

Post by smadsen »

acomjean wrote: post #74
jnovek wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want this story to continue, and for each of the five twenties that you spend, some increasingly elaborate and unlikely good thing happens.

I went through a couple years where I was finding cash kind of a lot. Not life changing amounts, but something. At work in the secure area when locking up I found a 10 inside the door. I didn't know what to do with it so I tacked it on the bulletin board by the door. Really obvious. Nobody took it for 2 weeks (which is kind of remarkable), so I took it back to buy lunch. I found a twenty in the snow on the street in…

This goes back to when my daughter was little, many years pre-covid. Whenever we went to a pizza restaurant that had a mini arcade with games and vending machines, she would check all of the change return trays. And inevitably, she would come back with a quarter or two. Every time. I figured maybe it was luck coming from her Irish ancestry.

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

#170

Post by Spooky23 »

kyleblarson wrote: post #165
ortusdux wrote: post #78

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 took an intro econ course in college in 1999. The professor gave us his past tests to use as practice and some of them dated back to the late 1950's.

I took a German literature course in the 90s, the professor used the same quizzes and tests since the early 60s.

A buddy of mine had a copy and I took the class for an easy A. The only gotcha is that you had to be physically present and give him advance notice of you were to be out.

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