181–190 of 481 posts
I know this isn't what you meant, but I was at a garage sale, and they had a stack of old books, one had a hollowed-out compartment in it that contained a "sex toy". I asked the proprietor of the garage sale where the books came from, and she said they were her fathers and he passed away and no one wanted them. I put the book back and didn't say anything.
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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.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/02/1114851706/library-notes-book...
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 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…
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
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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.