in college I retrieved a copy of waiting for godot from the bowels of main stacks at the recommendation of my girlfriend and found a note on the jacket from another person of the same name (an uncommon one at that) who had recommended it to her beau.
What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
311–320 of 481 posts
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
My chapter of Tau Beta Pi (engineering honor society) got so tired of how unfair it was that people would share around old tests and decided to do something about it. Since there is no way to stop people from doing this, we got permission from the dean to start a test and study sheet bank and made it publicly accessible on a website.
Over his whole career as a professor, my father was so concerned about test sharing that he kept a file of every test he ever gave and was careful to never ask the same question twice.
Respect, the amount of work to do that is mind boggling.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#313Tens of millions of German marks. They were stashed between the pages of a book, and they came from the era of hyperinflation during the 1920s.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#314I 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…
This is like the Harry Potter book where Harry gets Voldemorts old potions notebook. It made him a star pupil too.
Do you have a scar on your eyebrow?
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#315Years 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…
> It is the type of place you can get a grocery bag full of books for $30.
Try a church barn sale sometime. You can get a wheelbarrow of the greats for 20 bucks.
Truly, I have not read yet as a middle aged man all the books I bought as a teenager.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#316I 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…
> ... found that the entire book was annotated with all of his answers, anecdotes, and various other helpful notes. Didn't that defeat the purpose of the critical thinking course?
"You dare use my own spells against me, Potter."
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#3171. 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!
Hey, I didn’t expect to learn anything new about Coney Island but I was delightfully mistaken. Thanks for that link. Here’s a little more information about the old book I referred to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32337229
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#318In a used copy of William Kent’s Data and Reality, I found a 3x5” index card with a handwritten note in blue highlighter. On one side, “It’s who you know, not what you can do.” On the back, “Listen to your fucking conscience.” I always wonder what the story was there. It didn’t feel like a note to self; perhaps a warning for young programmers?
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similarly, with a slight twist, a prof I had used to recommend we read the entire text book, not just the chapters required for the class. It was an open book exam so people figured they could annotate the pages or whatever and didn't bother to follow his adcice. He would often say, 'everything [we] ever want to know is in that book!' He was right. The final exam was verbatim the practice exam given at the end of the…
That’s a fun anecdote, but horrible teaching.
Here's my little related story. I was in one of my fave used book stores (Baldwin's Book Barn in West Chester, PA) which is not exactly close to where I was living at the time. After browsing for an hour or so and picking out a few books, I spied a title on a top shelf that I thought was interesting but couldn't remember ever seeing before. I pulled the book down and began perusing it, and on the inside cover there was a familiar-looking stamped bookplate that said "Property of ." I was a little freaked out because I couldn't remember ever owning the book. After thinking about it a few minutes, I dimly recalled lending the book to somebody years ago and I guess it was never returned to me. When I went downstairs to the checkout counter, I showed the older man working that day my ID and the bookplate while telling my story, saying I never got a chance to read this book. He very kindly told me to just take the book and didn't charge me for it, saying "I'm just glad it found its way back to you."
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similarly, with a slight twist, a prof I had used to recommend we read the entire text book, not just the chapters required for the class. It was an open book exam so people figured they could annotate the pages or whatever and didn't bother to follow his adcice. He would often say, 'everything [we] ever want to know is in that book!' He was right. The final exam was verbatim the practice exam given at the end of the…
That’s a fun anecdote, but horrible teaching.
It depends what the class was for. I had a sort of similar experience with a physics class where the professor would take a break mid-exam and just give everyone the answers, but it was a class that was a prerequisite for engineering students who didn't care and really didn't need to, and also a stepping stone for the passionate physics students who did care, but would do the heavy lifting later. The prof was well-regarded for spending his time more on helping with true understanding for the students who cared.