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

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

#471

Post by topologie »

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…

This is really awesome. It's literally a real-life version of what happens in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. :)

From the wiki page: `Harry finds an old potions textbook, once belonging to "The Half-Blood Prince", an individual who wrote numerous spells and tips in the book. Harry, using the tips in the book, excels in Potions class, winning a bottle of Felix Felicis, or "Liquid Luck".`

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

#472

Post by sitkack »

miki123211 wrote: post #109

In my middle school German textbook, I found the following note (translation my own): Hi Katie, we should meet up over tea over these images. The first image should be a simple sketch of two dudes playing football, tell the guys in graphics that the one they gave me is waaa too complex. The second image should be a chick playing tennis. The note went on in this manner for a couple more sentences, describing all the i…

That is a beautiful poetic extra dimension of the book that only could could receive.

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

#474

Post by sammalloy »

fractallyte wrote: post #465
sammalloy wrote: post #201

Great article. I laughed when the card for the dentist fell out of the book, because I also use them as bookmarks. The strangest thing I ever found in a book wasn’t so much a physical item, it was more of a synchronicity of sorts. During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, after a jury acquitted the police of beating Rodney King, San Francisco experienced a smaller riot that lasted for six hours or so, resulting in the selec…

Offtopic: your account reminded me of a funny event from a few years back. I'd arranged with a friend to watch a movie, 28 Weeks Later ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later ). We picked a cinema in London's Canary Wharf area, not realizing that the movie was actually set there! Spoiler: in the movie, Canary Wharf is utterly destroyed by firebombing. When we emerged from the movie, we walked around in a daze,…

Thanks for this. Because of your comment, I’m going to rewatch the film series. It’s been a while.

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

#475

Post by MikePlacid »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #470
MikePlacid wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The idea of sending books that are deeply close to American history seems like an obviously terrible idea. Yeah no shit that wasn't going to resonate with an Iraqi child. A lot of these books are culturally foreign to American kids.

Great books are often cross-cultural. We Russian kids enjoyed Tom Sawyer very much. “It”s not every day that a boy gets a chance to paint a fence”… There was (and is) a lot of buzz in Russian culture about Moby Dick though I personally failed to enjoy it. Never heard of Of Mice and Men though - probably because our communists were rather puritanic.

I think problem was that planting a book-reading habits require a lot more work than providing books.

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

#476

Post by richardfey »

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.

I did not expect that.

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

#477

Post by klondike_klive »

xpe wrote: post #321
klondike_klive wrote: post #69

My dad died a couple of months ago and I'm still sorting through his and my mother's stuff, including a lot of books. I discovered in one of them he'd written a fake dedication from the author "To ____ who could have written this far better than I". And in the front of a copy of Tristram Shandy he'd written: "This is the 3rd copy I have bought. All the others have been STOLEN. If I ever get to read it I may find out…

Hilarious! A passive reader he was not. :) I hope going through the books helps you remember good memories.

Thanks!

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

#478

Post by jibbawi »

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…

> “It is so important that the children of Baghdad, the next generation of leaders of Iraq, obtain basic literacy skills. A love of learning and literacy will mean better job opportunities for them when they grow up. They will be able to better support their families and help build a more prosperous Iraq.”

Baghdad, before the invasion, was known for the high percentage of readers compared to other cities in the Middle East. We -Arabs- had a saying: "Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads." I doubt the above quote being the true goal of "My Arabic Library" project. I guess it was an attempt to change the culture of people by exposing them to American literature, which would help eventually the political cause of US government in Iraq.

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

#480

Post by Zancarius »

trebbble wrote: post #94
Zancarius wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can beat yourself up over it, but the reality is that you're right: Some people handle the past differently from others. You did the right thing by attempting to reunite them with their (presumably) priceless property. Most people likely wouldn't react this way. I know my parents lost a TON of personal items, including countless photos, when the moving company that was hired by the USAF to move them out of CA to…

> I know my parents lost a TON of personal items, including countless photos, when the moving company that was hired by the USAF to move them out of CA to another assignment went under. I'm close to someone who grew up in the military and lost ~all their family photos and childhood things the same [EDIT: "a similar", rather] way. A little bit lost with every move, nearly all of it gone by the end. Might be a common p…

I think you're right, unfortunately. If it's not lost wholesale (as in my parents' case) it's a war of attrition.

They had a number of interesting artifacts (my mother's Australian) and other items that would've been of value for posterity's sake. Especially now that my father has since passed--photographs from his earlier years would have been worth much more to us now.

As a Christian, I'm not hugely fussed over the loss of the material things, but the archivist in my heart is pained to no end!

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