Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

noctslackv2.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 481 posts

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#451

Post by harel »

em-bee wrote: post #415
harel wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days this would not fly... The risk of dropping a kid at some stranger's house all alone with a few floppies or tapes in this day and age could get a parent a stern visit from social services. But it was acceptable in the 80s...

nonsense. as soon as i have an address and a name, they are not a stranger anymore. i know exactly where my kids are, and no social services can tell me who i am allowed to trust and associate with.

I think you missed the jesting tone this was written in, but it's ok, I blame the font selection. It's too serious. ;-)

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#452

Post by The-Bus »

MikePlacid wrote: post #329
jacobolus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars (sold individually on the second-hand book market, after being carefully catalogued etc.), but nobody interested in buying books happened to be at the auction and the auctioneer set a $1 minimum bid because he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. The auction house could surely get significa…

> he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. This reminds me of one of the strangest things I ever read in the books: My Arabic Library About eighteen months before I arrived in Iraq, one of my predecessors had ordered My Arabic Library, $88,000 worth of books, an entire shipping container. My Arabic Library was a Bush-era, US government–wide…

Good double feature with the Shiv Ramdas rice truck story: https://twitter.com/nameshiv/status/1301521850552315904

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#453

Post by ryanmercer »

tomcam wrote: post #433
ryanmercer wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 place to read, and it had a little concourse named Luna Park. Inside it was a random coin-op machine…

If you think I, a mature, science-oriented man of substance, have any interest these "woo" books, you are 100% correct. Can't wait to read "Latitude 33". Long ago I deep-dove into the Ken Webster but found it ultimately unsatisfying because it was unfalsifiable. But what a ride!

It's not the greatest book but it was one I do not regret posting. They covered it on the Mysterious Universe podcast years ago which put it on my radar. Same with The Vertical Plane although, fortunately for people now, it's been re-printed so you don't have to pay an obscene amount for a copy of VP like I did.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#454

Post by jacobolus »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #436
jacobolus wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you look at the picture? https://i.imgur.com/0qiTKSQ.jpg Books I commonly buy secondhand that look roughly like those pictured are anywhere from $10–$200 each (depending on how common the particular book/edition is); we’re talking about pretty ordinary old academic books, nothing fancy or extremely rare. A pallet of books is ~500–1000 books (there are maybe 400 in the picture, but the blog author claims that is a…

That's selection bias because you are only looking at books that you actually wanted. An average book is worth much less than a book that someone actually wants.

An average (~worthless) book is something like a pulp romance novel, political book by a sitting politician, self-help guide, .... These are printed in the millions and used copies can typically be found for $1–$5 + shipping costs. That’s not the same kind of books primarily shown/described here.

Any scholarly person who loves old hardback books and spends a few decades collecting ones they personally want or need is going to end up with some worthless books, a large number that sell for $10–50 each, and a few that are worth hundreds each. It’s just inevitable, unless they go out of their way to only collect junk.

If I had to guess I’d put the price of the old man’s collection in the $10k–$30k range. But it’s plausible it could be more, if he collected anything rare.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#455

Post by kragen »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #435
kragen wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, if none of the books were rare, it might have only been thousands of dollars.

It easily could have been worth tens of dollars. Random books donated to Salvation Army aren't likely to be ones that people actually want. Books by the Foot will sell you books for about $0.20 per book https://booksbythefoot.com/product/shelf-filler-bulk/

The article said, "there were some very old, and often valuable, books in this boxes," which is somewhat difficult to interpret but seems to be saying that many of the books were valuable in the sense of fetching a high price, unlike those sold on the rather offensive page you link.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#457

Post by anukin »

ortusdux wrote: post #78

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…

Seems like the story of half blood prince right there.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#458

Post by gofreddygo »

massysett wrote: post #75
daviddaviddavid wrote: post #40

I 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 was with my girlfriend at a restaurant whose decor was filled with a bunch of old furniture and knickknacks. Next to our table was a stack of books. My girlfriend opened the top one and inside the cover was a bunch of money - maybe $200 in twenties? Over dinner we talked about what to do about this, and ultimately she added $20 more to the stash and left it in the book. That restaurant is now gone.

Congratulations, she's a keeper !

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#459

Post by em-bee »

harel wrote: post #451
em-bee wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nonsense. as soon as i have an address and a name, they are not a stranger anymore. i know exactly where my kids are, and no social services can tell me who i am allowed to trust and associate with.

I think you missed the jesting tone this was written in, but it's ok, I blame the font selection. It's too serious. ;-)

heh, sorry, a wink or /s would have helped. the problem is that i believe there are people who actually think that way. reality is stranger than fiction.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#460

Post by mecha_ghidorah »

ejolto wrote: post #372
mecha_ghidorah wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God I thought that was such a weird book. It attempts to build loads of tension around the idea that an old textbook has gasp prewritten notes in it. I know that it tries to imply it might be Voldemort's textbook but even if it was... would that be a huge deal unless it had something useful/interesting specifically about Voldemort? For me at least that part of it fell spectacularly flat

Did you read the second book? Voldemort's diary plays a huge part in that one, so it's not surprising that the characters would find Voldemort's text book interesting or ominous (possible horcrux too).

I did read the second book but the problem is that from a story perspective another old book being a horcrux would be... kinda lame IMO
Post reply on HN