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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?

#231

Post by currere »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #89
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…

Trouble is, luck is conserved. That's why you got COVID and a tax audit and three cavities at your next dental exam. At least that's what I tell myself when someone randomly finds $100 in a book...

Surely it's sufficient that someone else forgot the $100 in the book.

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

#232

Post by obiefernandez »

jacobolus wrote: post #20
spywaregorilla wrote: post #14

> He looked around at the faces in the crowd and said, “I’m opening the bidding at one dollar.” I about shit myself. I bid the $1 immediately to get things rolling. Well, after I bid, he looked around and said, “Once, twice, sold that man there for $1.” I just laughed… and wondered how the Hell I was going to get this pallet home and what I was going to do with all those books. > When I asked the auctioneer afterward…

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…

In the late 90s in Atlanta I got my first ever Mac computer (Performa iirc??) at an estate sale for free because it was "broken". The way we established that it was broken was because the power switch on the back of it did not do anything. I got home, did some light digging on the internet and determined that the power switch on the back is the main power, and that actually turning on the computer involved pushing one of the keys on the keyboard.

Booted up just fine.

I miss estate sales.

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

#233

Post by frosted-flakes »

_dain_ wrote: post #208
shepherdjerred wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you recommend HMOR? I’ve never heard of it, but the Wikipedia page sounded interesting

no it's terrible, see: https://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor/

Worst "book" I've ever read, legitimately. I would read almost anything else over that. I've never read the review and I only read 5-6 chapters of the fanfic, but everything in that review rings true. The story was so hollow and lifeless that I couldn't bring myself to read further.

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

#234

Post by floren »

kzrdude wrote: post #143
floren wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. When I've worked in secure areas, I've never had the slightest concern about theft. We even did an experiment where we left a couple $1 bills out on the tab…

Very nice but what about repeating it with $100? :)

If I still worked in such a place, I'd be willing to try the experiment with $100.

On the other hand I'd speculate that in a workplace, people are more likely to pick up $3 than they are to pick up $100. "It's just a couple bucks, somebody probably just forgot it here"

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

#235

Post by betamaxthetape »

asciimov wrote: post #180
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…

Like most used things these days, book buying/selling/collecting was way easier 20 years ago, before smart phones. Nowadays half of the market is flippers and scalpers, prices have shot up, and nobody is getting a pallet of good books for a dollar anymore.

I'm not sure I agree with this. The prices that things sold at might have been cheaper 20 years ago, but the advent of the web with used-goods marketplaces has allowed people to access things that were previously not available or hard to find.

I can go onto ebay and order things from the US that were never available locally in my home country. The same with Yahoo! Auctions for items sold only to the Japanese market. And not only can I access things that I couldn't before, but I can easily search for things. Want a copy of an obscure record? No need to search dozens of local stores - Discogs will probably have a few copies for sale. Need a book to complete a collection? Try a quick search on Amazon or Abebooks.

While the prices that things sell for may be higher, I find that it is considerably easier to collect things now than it would have been before the web.

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

#236

Post by zatkin »

A couple years ago I was trying to get ahold of Michael Spivak's Differential Geometry series. It was impossible to find copies of the book without paying 4 figures on sketchy listings off eBay, Craigslist, Amazon, or AbeBooks. Eventually I decided to dig around and see if I could contact him directly. When I found his contact info, I kindly wrote him an email, to which he took several months to respond. After several months of waiting for a reply, he surprisingly responded to me several months later. We continued to communicate and I sent payment to him via PayPal, and received the books. It was only a few months later that I found out he had passed away. I just found out, per a PDF on tug.org, that "he suffered a broken hip earlier in the fall, and had been confined to an extended care facility following that mishap."[1] Very sad to see him go, but I am forever grateful that he took the time to patiently work with me to obtain copies of his books. Today, his books are all available at mathpop.com, it seems the distributor got the series hooked into Amazon so they're more easily accessible.

[1] https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb42-3/tb132beeton-spivak.pdf

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

#237

Post by ortusdux »

trebbble wrote: post #88
kaesar14 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You lived the Half Blood Prince!

That element of the Half-Blood Prince was taken from real life. Used textbooks have been preferred by students for precisely for this reason (well, cost too, but this is a well-known benefit) in colleges since... well, probably since textbooks have existed.

Yeah, I actually bought the textbook in '03, a few years before Half-Blood Prince was published. The whole experience did ruin the twist a bit as I saw it coming a mile away.

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

#238

Post by stevage »

atombender wrote: post #160
kaesar14 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well of course, but the element of the book being annotated by the professor himself is quite interesting and most similar to HBP.

I don't think the parent is saying that the professor annotated the book, as that probably doesn't make any sense. As I interpreted their story, the professor had a habit of asking questions and then answering them himself, if nobody offered an answer. Students wrote down those answers in the margins of the book. Over time, the book collected a lot of these notes from different students.

Oh thanks! I totally misunderstood too.

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

#239

Post by zola »

_pazta wrote: post #221

When I lived in Brooklyn, folks in my neighborhood would often leave out things that they wanted to give away. I picked up a poetry book one day from the sidewalk and started thumbing through it on my walk home. One of the first pages had a handwritten note. The book apparently had been a gift, and the giver wrote a note to the giftee that began, "My dear fellow cannibal, ..."

So... did you keep it?

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

#240

Post by nestorD »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #129
gostsamo wrote: post #120

Earlier 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

It starts terrible (I have read extracts of the first chapters to others and they don't fail to get laughs that the author did not intend) but you get used to its and the writer improves making it a very nice read by the end.

Overall, I would recommend to not give up in the first chapters.

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