When I lived in Brooklyn, folks in my neighborhood would often leave out things that they wanted to give away. I picked up a poetry book one day from the sidewalk and started thumbing through it on my walk home. One of the first pages had a handwritten note. The book apparently had been a gift, and the giver wrote a note to the giftee that began, "My dear fellow cannibal, ..."
What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
221–230 of 481 posts
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#222I 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…
I lent one my cool science fiction books to a good friend, and once I got it back and decided to re-read it myself, found that he was using a $10 canadian as bookmark. It's one of my bookmarks now, although I may use it next time I go to Vancouver. Maybe. It's pleasantly plasticky in that ineffable "Canadien" way.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#223From “A college mystery: the story of the apparition in the Fellows' Garden at Christ's College, Cambridge
Baker, A. P / 2nd ed.
1925”:
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a far stretch to "tens of thousands of dollars." A valuable second-hand book can be $50.
A lot of older books that are now out of print often run many hundreds of dollars, if not more. For example, I've been trying to find a complete unabridged edition of Fraser's Golden Bough, which isn't that niche - you'll find it cited somewhere in any work on mythology- and it seems to run in the high-hundreds to low thousands. A quick look shows a first edition selling for 12k all by itself. Similarly, I'm looking…
> Collected Works of Carl Jung
Out of curiosity, why this specific publication? Can’t you get everything in that collection from other publications (perhaps not in one volume)?
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#225I 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…
Your professor was the Half-Blood Prince.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#226Someone's antique pay packet in New Zealand pounds which had been taken out of circulation.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#227In 10th grade I wasn't sure I could register to a chemistry with one teacher so I didn't. But when school started, the teacher who was supposed to teach the class was different and accepted me into the class. However, I didn't anticipate needing the textbook, so she sent me back to the class library where there was some hard-worn copies of various classbooks. I was in luck that the book she wanted me to have was there, but it was really, really worn out, and written all over. But beggars can't be choosers, so I took what was there for me.
Well, going through the class I've discovered that all the writing on the margins was actually incredibly useful! I followed them whenever I could, and when we were doing routine chemistry experiments measuring pH of acids and playing with precipitation, my experiments miraculously came up with new varieties of teflon coating! While everyone else's salt crystals looked boring, I was able to grow fabulous Bismuth crystals. My class mates grew suspicious of my prowess since previously I showed no aptitude to chemistry. After an altercation with one of other jealous students, I realized that I had to hide the book somewhere safe, and it is likely still sitting in the back closet of the school's cafeteria waiting for next lucky student.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#228Found a space between two pages to hide money - so good a place to hide money I myself never found these bills again.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#2291. 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…
If you're interested in the history of Luna Park and Coney Island as a whole, I recommend checking out Defunctland's video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C5kxkBPhpE
Edit: Also, we need to hear more about this UFO book!
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#230Reminds me of a time as a kid when I went to the bookstore and put positive notes in the books, like "have a wonderful day!"
I know in the library and some bookstores, I have found notes about finding "god" in books on evolution and atheisim.