A french newspaper clipping from 1907 - the book documented some museum's collection and the newspaper article was very tangentially related, but the museum was in the UK and didn't have anything french in it.
What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
261–270 of 481 posts
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#262What was truly won at that auction was a priceless friendship and the ability for someone to pass down some of their prized books to their grandchildren. Amazing.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#263Earlier 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…
What happened if you ordered the books only after the first day of class?
That's what we did. We waited for the bookstore to open the aisles, found the books, ordered them online, and waited a few weeks to get them. This was before Amazon Prime shipping, you see. The professors were usually sympathetic.
Except my political science prof. So I just dropped the course. Fuck him and his unironic bowtie.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#264I 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.
Yes! This is exactly what this story reminded me of.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is bringing back bad memories of my Electromagnetic Fields class...
“None shall pass!”
My EM theory second year was quite tricky
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#266I 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 found a bunch of books and photo albums sitting out for garbage collection. The albums were full of family photos stretching over years. I tracked down the owner via facebook. She had moved to another country and -- I suspect had separated from her husband. She was not interested in the photo albums. It seemed rather poignant. I wonder what the story was behind it.
This has nothing to do with books, but my (now ex) wife and I met another couple many years ago, and we were friendly for a short while until they moved away. A year later, my wife got an itch to talk to the other wife. She had no address or contact info, but my wife was part bloodhound at this sort of thing, remembered her mentioning her parents in another state, and eventually tracked them down to see if she could get the other lady's contact info.
The other lady called my wife back... and the conversation went something like "how did you find me? Please don't ever contact me or my parents again, just pretend you never met me, and please, please, don't ever let my husband know where I am."
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you recommend HMOR? I’ve never heard of it, but the Wikipedia page sounded interesting
I thought it was quite good. If you basically like Harry Potter but find it infuriating how often the protagonists problems could have been solved in five minutes if they would have just told the adults... then HPMOR might interest you. Now, it's a didactic book, it's rather long, and you may or may not agree with the author's worldview, so whether you'll really enjoy it I can't say. But it's very well-written and in…
Well, in HPMOR, Harry discovers at the end he would have solved a quite major problem very early on if he had bothered to inform Dumbledore of some extremely important facts regarding Professor Quirrel.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#268I bought an old book at a used book store and I found the receipt for the original book purchase inside. The receipt had the buyer's name and credit card number clearly printed.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#269I once picked up a very old Loeb edition of Aeschylus, and there was a four-leaf clover stuck between almost every page.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#270The wonderful book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki contains a page which is blank except for a drawing of a fly in one corner. Nowhere else in the book is it mentioned or any explanation provided. Having practiced Zen for 10 years, I have an idea that might explain it. But on the surface, it is completely strange and inexplicable.
Perhaps just another way of saying "page intentionally left blank".