I bought a used book on mountain climbing and inside were two business cards: one for a security specialist out of Whiteman Air Force Base who worked for the 509 Bomb Wing (which flies B-2 Stealth bombers) and the other for the director of a forensic lab which does homicide crime scene investigation for a county Office of the Prosecutor in New Jersey. I always thought there was a story there connecting the two but there were no other clues save the hand-written name of a person from Venice, FL, on the back of one.
What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
211–220 of 481 posts
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#212I 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…
Reminds me of over a decade ago I was in a high school AP course. At the start of the course, the teacher recommended we get a AP prep book to study throughout the year, and recommended 2 brands. She specifically said not to get one brand, noting that it was of inferior quality. I had already got the prep book she didn't recommend as I had found it on sale before that remark was made. I later learned that she used that book for all of her test questions, sometimes literally copying the test from the book with minimal editing. I got a 100% on a test out of the blue after averaging in the 80s and then had to make it less obvious.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happened if you ordered the books only after the first day of class?
In my experience they run out of books
All the students in a course I was teaching apparently were using Chegg for the previous year’s textbook so I decided to use as a supplement (to Strang [which was not the previous year’s book but had all the answers online anyway]) an old Mir publishers book on Diff Eq which I can’t remember exactly how I got (either a bookstore in the French quarter or maybe a library remainder sale).
At any rate it turns out the English printing is so rare not only can it not be found on Libgen - the few copies online are selling for hundreds of dollars (which I certainly would not have paid for it). So not only did I luck into a paper fortune (I suspect this is a rather illiquid market - plus I had to go through and fix a bunch of typos by hand, so much for the Soviet STEM educational complex) the kids _definitely_ couldn’t find this on the Internet.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recently I read HPMOR and this paragraph was one of many delights there: The cold in the room seemed to deepen. “A sixth-year Gryffindor cast a curse at one of my more promising students, a sixth-year Slytherin.” Harry swallowed. “What...sort of curse?” And the fury on Professor Quirrell’s face was no longer contained. “Why bother to ask an unimportant question like that, Mr Potter? Our friend the sixth-year Gryffind…
Do you recommend HMOR? I’ve never heard of it, but the Wikipedia page sounded interesting
Absolutely. It's probably the best book i've ever read.
Describing it as a Harry Potter fanfic is technically accurate but really doesn't do it justice. It's basically a story of what would happen if an extremely smart, educated and technically minded person would do if put into the role of Harry Potter.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took an intro econ course in college in 1999. The professor gave us his past tests to use as practice and some of them dated back to the late 1950's.
Was there supply-demand curve pushing in the 1950s?
The classic supply-demand curve picture dates from 1890, so that would be a firm yes.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#216A reminder slip to attend an artificial limb clinic
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#2171. 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…
* I bought a 500 year-old book full of engravings that turned out to have pictures of UFOs in it* which book is that? do you have photos?
Sorry, took me a while to find the book. We're moving. It's called "Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon" (A History of Celestial Signs and Miracles), By Conrad Lycosthenes, published in 1557. It's full of crazy stuff, and like modern clickbait they recycle the same pictures many times throughout the book. There are pictures of people flayed open, chimeras, dragons, etc., with many other pictures portraying fairly mundane aspects of life accurately.
UFO: https://imgur.com/zOE4WTR
City in ruins: https://imgur.com/BcZhMkk
Exceptionally happy Satyr: https://imgur.com/EBiIjDF
More info about the book:
https://library.princeton.edu/byzantine/translation/16207
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#218I found an advertisement for cigarettes in the middle of Creatures of Light and Darkness.
Can confirm the ebook lacks any ads for Newport Reds (which might have gone well with Wrath of the Red Lady immediately before), or any other cigarettes
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoting: > ... I looked through some of the books in the top boxes and realized that there were some very old, and often valuable, books in this boxes. You're right that this isn't saying that the books were definitely worth a lot of money, so it really say something remotely similar.
That's a far stretch to "tens of thousands of dollars." A valuable second-hand book can be $50.
I have a book printed less than 5 years ago that routinely sells for $800 online now. The niche religious press that published it simply cannot keep all of the authors work in print and his more academic work gets printed maybe once a decade in a run of 1000.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#220In grad school, I checked a book out of the library and found an envelope for a congratulations card with something like $50 in it in various small bills. I felt bad because it seemed like it was a collection for a gift or something but there was no name on it. But I didn't feel so bad that I went to see if the library could tell me who checked the book out before me...
I doubt a librarian would tell you who checks out what books.
no but they could have contacted the person and let them know