I found a few 1860s wedding certificates and a handwritten IOU from the same era in one of my grandfather’s reference books on stamp collecting.
What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
301–310 of 481 posts
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#302I 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.
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Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having a thorough description of the page's images seems like an nice unexpected benefit for accessibility. Do you use any tools to interpret images in other content?
Modern versions of Chrome and Edge have features that try to guess what an image contains using AI techniques. Same with iOs and Mac OS. Modern iPhones even try to recognize controls on the screen, but my phone is too old for that to work. These solutions are still in their infancy, though, and therefore far from perfect. They might help us jump through a small accessibility hurdle once in a while, but without seriou…
I'll one-up this a bit: a blind woman called Kristy Viers demonstrates on YouTube how she uses various things, among them iPhone with the onscreen six-finger Braille keyboard. But also she uses the ‘magnifier’ app to tell her what is there around her, i.e. what the camera sees: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8CAafjodkyE
(The videos are filmed by her boyfriend, in case someone has to wonder.)
I realize that the vid is not too informative to a blind person, other than a vague demo. IDK where to find more info on the setup, since I'm not a user of iPhones myself. Comments on YouTube say that the magnifier app is in the accessibility options, that it adds a home screen app when enabled, and that it works at least on iPhone 10 since that's what Kristy uses.
I would also guess that such usage requires persistent mobile connection and consumes considerable traffic and battery—but again, with modern tech magic I won't bet against it working locally on the phone.
On Android, the feature called ‘Lens’ in the Google's camera app can describe some things, more useful to seeing people IMO: e.g. the model of a car—basically the same as Google's image search does, these days. Also purportedly can read and translate text signs. But IDK how far that goes, never heard of it doing stuff like those descriptions by the iPhone magnifier.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really never know how people will respond to having their past thrust at them like this. Or how they'll respond to strange phone calls. I've bought many books over the years that had prior owner's names marked inside somewhere. On a few occasions I've bothered to try and identify/find the person in question. Once or twice I was successful, but I never bothered contacting them just to say "Hey, I bought this book…
When I was young, my collection of books ebbed and flowed based on how much spare cash I had. In lean times, I'd end up selling them, then eventually accumulate more. Once I got my career on a more consistent path, I collected books and ended up with a pretty diverse set, but in the back of my head I used the fact that I hadn't sold them as a barometer for my financial stability. Anyway, a couple of years ago, at the…
When I moved out of my parent's home I of course left a bunch of random stuff behind including a few boxes of books that I didn't want to haul. Left them in the garage and forgot about them. A few years later my dad was cleaning up the darker corners of the garage and called me up, 'Hey there are some boxes of books in the garage, do you want them or can I just take them to goodwill.' I didn't want them at the time, I hadn't wanted them for years and I couldn't be bothered, so he ended up donating them.
A few years later I got a hankering to read the Dune series again and realized that they had been in one of those boxes. So I went to a used bookstore and found all the original dune books but god emperor. A few weeks later in another used bookstore I found a copy of god emperor. A beat up paperback, beat up in a very particular way. I flipped to the inner back cover where I found my initials. Apparently somehow my copy of god emperor donated out on the kitsap peninsula years before made it's way into a second hand book shop in seattle where I repurchased it.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#305I found a $100 treasury bill in a Goodwill book a few years ago. It had some lady’s SS number and address on it. Date was 1973, so $100 was not a small deal.
Hand writing in books is super underrated. Underlining, summarizations, etc. are all really useful. I love when I have an old technical book that has a passage I can’t understand and then some stranger from years ago who did figure out what the author was conveying explains it in their own words in the margin.
Write notes in the books you own and buy books that have notes in them.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#306QR code in a kids book that redirected to a porn site...
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#307Years ago, I went into this third hand style book shop. It is located in the bottom of a church basement in the Midwest. It is the type of place you can get a grocery bag full of books for $30. Oddly, they also had some full sets of various encyclopedia books for free. I thought it could be an interesting set to have around so I grabbed one. It was a New Illustrated Columbia Encyclopedia 1975. Months later, I was loo…
One Rhonda Sollberger is fairly easily found on Facebook via Google (different last name currently). The others are trickier.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#308I 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…
So my version of that story is less analog and arguably less academically honest. I had a somewhat challenging mid-level math class in college where after each homework assignment and test the professor would give us a URL to a PDF of his scanned handwritten completed version of the work. The URL path was something like /math-321/2019/fall/test-1.pdf, and the professor diligently made sure that each file wasn't avail…
Gods I miss the halcyon days of pulling the entire file directory down and rooting around for interesting stuff like that.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#309Earlier 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…
I remember finding a $20 on the floor in middle school once. Felt like a fortune.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#310A book I found in a design store in Helsinki consisted of an entire novel (one of Dickens’, I think) that had been sorted, word by word, into alphabetical order. For example, all the “the’s” were grouped together.
I guess the artist who made it was trying to say something, but I couldn’t tell what. Order matters? Books are a fraud? Maybe the punchline for a joke, “here is the book you ordered! Get it? Ordered!”