[HN Gopher] What's the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
___________________________________________________________________
What's the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
Author : ColinWright
Score : 545 points
Date : 2022-08-03 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (noctslackv2.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (noctslackv2.wordpress.com)
| hcrisp wrote:
| 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.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > 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 afterwards why he'd let it go so
| cheaply, he said, "Did you see anyone trampling you to get in a
| bid?" I said no, I didn't. His reply, with a smirk on his face,
| was, "Gotta' know your audience in this job."
|
| > Well, needless to say, I got the books home and spent a few
| years going through them and selling some, giving some away, etc.
| However, that's not the point of this story. The point was
| finding things in books. So, with that in mind...
|
| Dude goes to an auction and finds books. Nobody bids on the
| books. Dude is amazed that the auctioneer is willing to sell him
| something nobody wants for a low price. Dude spends years going
| through those books.
|
| I'm happy for this guy.
| highwaylights wrote:
| You'd love the "Time Enough at Last" episode of The Twilight
| Zone if you've never seen it. Maybe don't Google it, though!
| ColinWright wrote:
| Your summary is kinda accurate, but I can't help but feel that
| you've missed the point completely.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| It's not the point, it's just the part of it I enjoyed
| motoboi wrote:
| Dude found friend.
| jacobolus wrote:
| 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 significantly
| more for their books if they knew the right venue to sell them
| (somewhere frequented by used booksellers), but I guess it
| wasn't worth their trouble to figure out where that might be.
|
| This is sort of like the time I went to a car auction as a kid
| and some college students bought a lightly used stretch limo in
| perfect working order for (the minimum bid of) $100.
| bluGill wrote:
| Good auctioneers make sure that there is a buyer for specific
| things like that. I'm surprised that there wasn't a used book
| buyer in the crowd. Though maybe his guy didn't show up.
| cperciva wrote:
| Good auctioneers make sure there are _at least two_ buyers
| for specific things like that.
| bluGill wrote:
| That depends. For things they expect to go be worth a lot
| they want two buyers. However for things like scrap metal
| they just want one buyer - they know that buyer will get
| a great deal, but the value in scrap isn't high enough to
| support two and so getting a second buyer means both will
| disappear soon.
|
| Good auctioneers know what goes to each category.
| vlunkr wrote:
| It's a Salvation Army auction. I imagine the main purpose
| is to dump stuff that they haven't found any other use for.
| They get all this stuff for free, any money they happen to
| make from an auction is just a nice bonus.
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly this - and 99% of the time a "pallet of books
| from Salvation Army/Goodwill" will be entirely romance
| novels and cookbooks and not worth the pulp.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars
|
| The article does not say that or anything remotely similar.
| ColinWright wrote:
| 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.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| That's a far stretch to "tens of thousands of dollars." A
| valuable second-hand book can be $50.
| joyfylbanana wrote:
| I quite recently bought a used book for something like
| $100. Certain books can be expensive, it was not a
| popular or particularly good book, but the writer was a
| character and I guess therefore his written books are
| valuable niche items... Also no more will be printed, so
| there is limited supply. Similar for some old music
| sheets or records.
|
| However these are definitely not liquid, if you are going
| to sell them you maybe have to store them for a long
| time.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| ...and there are good condition, first-edition old books
| that sell for thousands. How does that relate to this
| thread?
| [deleted]
| samstave wrote:
| I had a first edition "Understand? Good. Play!" (A book
| of translations of quotes from Hatsumi Masaaki, GM of
| Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu...
|
| At one point it was hard to get and were selling for $700
| - they are now $50.
|
| Had a friend find a bunch of $100 bills in a used book in
| Salvation Army in SF...
| Amezarak wrote:
| A lot of older books that are now out of print often run
| many hundreds of dollars, if not more. For example, I've
| been trying to find a complete unabridged edition of
| Fraser's Golden Bough, which isn't _that_ niche - you 'll
| find it cited somewhere in any work on mythology- and it
| seems to run in the high-hundreds to low thousands. A
| quick look shows a first edition selling for 12k all by
| itself.
|
| Similarly, I'm looking for the complete Collected Works
| of Carl Jung, and that's got a hefty price too. Maybe one
| day. :)
|
| I'm sure both of these examples are sitting in some old
| man's study and are getting sold for nothing at estate
| sales, if they aren't just thrown in a dumpster or pulped
| after being donated to a library that can't get rid of
| them either. But nobody is indexing estate sales.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > Collected Works of Carl Jung
|
| Out of curiosity, why this specific publication? Can't
| you get everything in that collection from other
| publications (perhaps not in one volume)?
| ticviking wrote:
| 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.
| wowokay wrote:
| Idk with the amount of books referenced and the
| definitive fact the some of them were resold at least
| indicates a good chance of making thousands of dollars,
| otherwise It's logical to assume if the effort has not
| been worth it the author would have commented as such.
| iratewizard wrote:
| The article is about a guy who finds a friend inside of
| his pallet of books and you're all arguing about the
| theoretical value of the books.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Never change, HN.
| asciimov wrote:
| 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.
| betamaxthetape wrote:
| 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.
| obiefernandez wrote:
| 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.
| ortusdux wrote:
| 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 his answers, anecdotes, and
| various other helpful notes. There was even a table that
| accurately listed his wardrobe choices! The notes were in several
| different handwritings, and the book had been resold over a dozen
| times, so that professor must have been teaching the same class
| the exact same way for a decade or more. I quickly became a star
| pupil as I always had an answer ready. I added a few notes along
| the way and then sold it back to the bookstore at the end of the
| year. I really wanted to keep it for posterity, but It just
| seemed wrong to take it out of circulation.
| 1-6 wrote:
| This can make a nice movie plot.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| You lived the Half Blood Prince!
| trebbble wrote:
| 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.
| ortusdux wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Used textbooks have been preferred by students for
| precisely for this reason_
|
| Same as good class hand notes from students, that get (or
| used to get) photocopied and handed down through the years
| to new students...
| moron4hire wrote:
| Halfway through my college experience (around 2002 or so),
| the university started putting up blinders in the bookstore
| while they stocked shelves and wouldn't let you buy your
| books until basically the first day of class, specifically
| in an attempt to stymie students finding their books,
| looking them up, and buying them at 1/10th the price
| online.
|
| I mean, it wasn't my first experience with the university
| prioritizing profit over helping students, but it was
| definitely emblematic.
|
| Most of us figured out that we could get along fine not
| having the textbook in the first couple of weeks of class.
| But ultimately, the university was out to actively sabotage
| the used textbook market. The only source of used books was
| online. So I never got to experience this community of used
| book students.
| GloriousKoji wrote:
| They go through some pretty extreme lengths to get you to
| waste money on buying books from them. The English
| classes my university published a new "reader textbook"
| ever quarter. It was just a crappy bounded letter paper
| book with section from various novels that they change up
| every quarter so you couldn't use an old one. The on
| campus copy center and nearby
| kinkos/staples/officemax/officedepot wouldn't photocopy
| it but a half hour drive out would reach stores that
| didn't care. A photocopy costed about 1/5 of the price
| the university was selling it at.
| merlyn wrote:
| Years ago at the university, we had to buy straightup
| photocopies of articles and such out of
| books/magazines/whatever that the class would be taught
| off of at the campus bookstore at prices much higher than
| per-page copy.
|
| Something about paying the source for licensing and
| distribution was the reason given.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| On the other hand, my physics prof in relativity made us
| buy photocopies of his lecture notes, since he didn't
| like any of the available textbooks. (Don't sneer - I'm
| pretty sure he was better than any of them.) His notes
| cost, IIRC, $4 for 90-100 pages. This was 1983, but
| still, four cents a page is pretty good.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Some book publishers also release new versions that
| change nothing other than make slight changes and
| reorderings of the exercises so that you can't easily use
| an old version for your homework assignments.
| konschubert wrote:
| What happened if you ordered the books only after the
| first day of class?
| trebbble wrote:
| At my school the savvy students wouldn't buy their books
| until after the first session of a course anyway, since
| the professors would often, in that first meeting,
| explain that some books listed in the syllabus as
| required were actually optional, or that they'd support
| some set of older editions of a book than the syllabus
| listed ("it lists the 5th edition, but it's OK if you get
| the 4th, and if all you can get ahold of is the 3rd, see
| me after class and we'll get something sorted out--but
| nothing older than that").
| ipaddr wrote:
| In my experience they run out of books
| selimthegrim wrote:
| 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.
| jrumbut wrote:
| This thread is bringing back so many bad memories.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Well of course, but the element of the book being annotated
| by the professor himself is quite interesting and most
| similar to HBP.
| atombender wrote:
| 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.
| stevage wrote:
| Oh thanks! I totally misunderstood too.
| h0p3 wrote:
| I hope you didn't cast any random spells scrawled in your
| Advanced Potion-Making book. Sectumsempra is a nono, I hear.
| gostsamo wrote:
| 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 Gryffindor did not
| think it was important!"
|
| "Are you serious?" Harry said before he could stop himself.
|
| "No, I'm in a terrible mood today for no particular reason.
| Yes I'm serious, you fool! He didn't know. He actually didn't
| know. I didn't believe it until the Aurors confirmed it under
| Veritaserum. He is in his sixth year at Hogwarts and he cast
| a high-level Dark curse without knowing what it did."
|
| "You don't mean," Harry said, "that he was mistaken about
| what it did, that he somehow read the wrong spell
| description--"
|
| "All he knew was that it was meant to be directed at an
| enemy. He knew that was all he knew."
|
| And that had been enough to cast the spell. "I do not
| understand how anything with that small a brain could walk
| upright."
|
| "Indeed, Mr Potter," said Professor Quirrell.
|
| There was a pause. Professor Quirrell leaned forward and
| picked up the silver inkwell from his desk, turning it around
| in his hands, staring at it as though wondering how he could
| go about torturing an inkwell to death.
|
| "Was the sixth-year Slytherin seriously hurt?" said Harry.
|
| "Yes."
|
| "Was the sixth-year Gryffindor raised by Muggles?"
|
| "Yes."
|
| "Is Dumbledore refusing to expel him because the poor boy
| didn't know?"
|
| Professor Quirrell's hands whitened on the inkwell. "Do you
| have a point, Mr Potter, or are you just stating the
| obvious?"
|
| "Professor Quirrell," said Harry gravely, "all the Muggle-
| raised students in Hogwarts need a safety lecture in which
| they are told the things so ridiculously obvious that no
| wizardborn would ever think to mention them. Don't cast
| curses if you don't know what they do, if you discover
| something dangerous don't tell the world about it, don't brew
| high-level potions without supervision in a bathroom, the
| reason why there are underage magic laws, all the basics."
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Do you recommend HMOR? I've never heard of it, but the
| Wikipedia page sounded interesting
| martin-t wrote:
| 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.
| MollyRealized wrote:
| Completely agree with other commenter. It's a very
| interesting read. I don't necessarily agree with every
| statement but it's a learning experience that is made
| exceptionally enjoyable by fantastic writing.
| chanbam wrote:
| I _wholeheartedly_ recommend it
| nanomonkey wrote:
| It is good, but loooong. I would suggest the audio-book
| for a painless experience.
| D-Coder wrote:
| It's very funny. Every chapter has something. From
| Chapter 48 (about two pages long):
|
| And when Harry had offered that hypothesis, Draco had
| claimed that he could remember a story - Harry hoped to
| Cthulhu that this one story was just a fairy tale, it had
| that ring to it, but there was a story - about Salazar
| Slytherin sending a brave young viper on a mission to
| gather information from other snakes.
|
| If any snake a Parselmouth had talked to, could make
| other snakes self-aware by talking to them, then...
|
| Then...
|
| Harry didn't even know why his mind was going all
| "then... then..." when he knew perfectly well how the
| exponential progression would work, it was just the sheer
| moral horror of it that was blowing his mind.
|
| And what if someone had invented a spell like that to
| talk to cows?
|
| What if there were Poultrymouths?
| burlesona wrote:
| I thought it was quite good. If you basically like Harry
| Potter but find it infuriating how often the protagonists
| problems could have been solved in five minutes if they
| would have just told the adults... then HPMOR might
| interest you. Now, it's a didactic book, it's rather
| long, and you may or may not agree with the author's
| worldview, so whether you'll really enjoy it I can't say.
| But it's very well-written and in some ways tells a more
| "believable" Harry Potter story than the originals.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| I feel like basically the only way in which the original
| Harry Potter story is more believable is that in the
| original story, almost everyone is impressively
| thoughtless
| _dain_ wrote:
| no it's terrible, see: https://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor/
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| 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.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Definitely. I might not always agree with the author, but
| reading it is like having an intelligent and funny
| conversation.
| tshaddox wrote:
| 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 available
| until after each test was completely. Unfortunately, the
| professor was not sufficiently diligent to remove URLs using
| the exact same pattern for previous years and semesters of the
| same course. I discovered throughout the course that there had
| been some trivial changes to the assignments and tests (moving
| questions around, slightly changing constants, etc.) and only a
| few non-trivial changes.
| gtk40 wrote:
| 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.
| ktpsns wrote:
| I did the same, shared with my fellows, got denounced, got a
| written warning by the university and the faculty hated me
| afterwards for "hacking".
| kyleblarson wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I took a German literature course in the 90s, the professor
| used the same quizzes and tests since the early 60s.
|
| A buddy of mine had a copy and I took the class for an easy
| A. The only gotcha is that you had to be physically present
| and give him advance notice of you were to be out.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| This is bringing back bad memories of my Electromagnetic
| Fields class...
| melony wrote:
| Was there supply-demand curve pushing in the 1950s?
| btilly wrote:
| The classic supply-demand curve picture dates from 1890, so
| that would be a firm yes.
| docmars wrote:
| Your professor was the Half-Blood Prince.
| alexalx666 wrote:
| thanks for the links :D
| chad_strategic wrote:
| Every once in a while you find a really good story on the
| internets.
|
| Thank you.
| dmead wrote:
| I found a hand written manuscript about lambda calculus that was
| bound in something that looked like it was from the 50s.
| drooopy wrote:
| The last chapter in Stephen King's IT /s
| yuan43 wrote:
| NPR ran a story yesterday on the Oakland Public Library's
| collection of things found in books:
|
| https://www.npr.org/2022/08/02/1114851706/library-notes-book...
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Bought a random book about the merger of the Chicago board of
| trade a few weeks ago and inside found the author's business
| card.
| miki123211 wrote:
| 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 images on the page. Because I was a blind
| student who used a screen reader, I had to get the PDF version
| from the publishing company, which I then put in a specialized
| ebook reading app for the blind. I strongly suspect that the
| editors of that book used some PDF tricks for hiding information
| to post notes to each other. Whether they were alt descriptions,
| white fonts on white background, regions shrunk to be 1px tall by
| 1px wide or something else entirely, I do not know. That file was
| intended for printing, not digital distribution, so I guess that
| they decided the notes didn't need removing as long as they
| weren't visible.
| gibolt wrote:
| Having a thorough description of the page's images seems like
| an nice unexpected benefit for accessibility.
|
| Do you use any tools to interpret images in other content?
| computator wrote:
| In the late 1990s, after watching the movie WarGames (1983), I
| saw a scene where Matthew Broderick's character is researching
| the computer scientist Stephen Falken to try to guess his
| password. There was a brief glimpse of a Scientific American
| magazine cover[1] titled "Falken's maze: Teaching a machine to
| learn". That sounded fascinating and I went to the university
| library to find that issue of Scientific American in bound
| periodicals. As you have likely already guessed, it turned out
| that the cover had been faked for the movie and that the actual
| cover was something completely different. But someone had
| handwritten on the cover page: "I bet you were looking for
| Falken's maze!"
|
| [1] https://www.mscroggs.co.uk/blog/tags/books (halfway down has
| a photo of the Scientific American issue)
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Reminds me of a time as a kid when I went to the bookstore and
| put positive notes in the books, like "have a wonderful day!"
| mindcrime wrote:
| The notes I leave in books at bookstores all say "Who is John
| Galt?"
| keithnz wrote:
| I know in the library and some bookstores, I have found notes
| about finding "god" in books on evolution and atheisim.
| coldblues wrote:
| There's a lot of people you can randomly encounter, especially on
| the internet, if you're curious enough to wander around in the
| vast series of tubes. I always go around like a creep clicking on
| various links, finding people's websites and profiles, and
| joining their groups or sending them a message. A lot of
| interesting people that I've even made friends with, I have
| encountered this way, and I have many tales to tell.
| Cyder wrote:
| I paid one $US dollar for a book at a yard sale and later found a
| 20 euro note inside. I'll never spend it ( not in EU ) but it was
| a nice surprise since I'd never seen one.
| garyrob wrote:
| The wonderful book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
| contains a page which is blank except for a drawing of a fly in
| one corner. Nowhere else in the book is it mentioned or any
| explanation provided. Having practiced Zen for 10 years, I have
| an idea that might explain it. But on the surface, it is
| completely strange and inexplicable.
| _1tan wrote:
| Care to explain your idea?
| lake_vincent wrote:
| The book _is_ the explanation :)
| somat wrote:
| Porpoise
|
| http://www.thecodelesscode.com/case/66
| Group_B wrote:
| A hot topic receipt and a boarding pass, together.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| What a delightful story.
| anony23 wrote:
| I found a plane ticket stub from decades ago.
| gilmore606 wrote:
| When I was 13, I checked out Steven Levy's "Hackers" from the
| public library.
|
| Inside I found a handwritten note from a 14 year old boy which
| said something to the effect of "If you like stuff like this,
| call me!" So I did! We ended up being friends for a couple years
| and exchanging C64 software and talking about nerd stuff.
| em-bee wrote:
| that's a great story. before the internet there were no easy
| ways to find others who were into computers. as far as i can
| remember i was the only one in my school who would hang out in
| the schools computer room after classes. i am pretty sure there
| were other kids in other schools that were interested in
| computers, but i had no way of finding them. meeting someone
| like that would have been great.
| zatkin wrote:
| 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
| ggm wrote:
| A reminder slip to attend an artificial limb clinic
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Our family had these 1880 catechism books since forever. In the
| back cover there was a letter written in old Lithuanian about
| running away from war (1945).
| trebbble wrote:
| Mine:
|
| 1) A note from one feminine-name to another assuring her that the
| book it was in (which was a gift, evidently, and this the
| accompanying card) would be a good start to her college journey,
| and wishing her success. It's a Modern Library copy of Plato's
| _Republic_ published in IIRC the '50s. The hand and condition of
| the note fit with its having been gifted around that time--so,
| probably it was gifted new, not long after the publication date.
| Found it really touching for some reason, always wished
| (voyeuristically, I suppose) I could learn how all that turned
| out.
|
| 2) Set of _Ex Libris_ stickers in the front of a multi-volume
| Folio Society history of England identifying it as from the
| library of a moderately well-known (so I gather--I 'd not heard
| of 'em) 1980s Conservative British politician (I'm in the US, and
| the online listing I bought them from made no note of this). Had
| a title, too, Lord something-or-other. Judging from the tightness
| of the spines I don't think they'd ever been opened, probably
| just office decoration. Now that I think about it, I should see
| if I can track down photos of the guy's office and spot these in
| the background... 5-volume set, so it might be possible to pick
| them out even in a poor photo.
|
| 3) Late 19th century reading-size catholic bible that must have
| been a family bible, because it had about a hundred years of
| family history in it, up to IIRC the 1920s, going all the way
| back to "The Old Country". I've held on to it for years because I
| keep thinking I should do _something_ to preserve that or get it
| to someone who cares, but realistically, probably never will.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| My wife's artist friend loaned us a beautiful old book about a
| famous restaurant and it's menus - Del Monicos. It was handsomely
| illustrated. Including the feast for Lincoln's inauguration
| dinner etc.
|
| Original binding but for some added librarians' tape to keep the
| covers stable. She paid $6 at a thrift shop.
|
| I googled a bit - worth $400 to $600! She doesn't care; its all
| about the beautiful illustrations for her.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| My Israeli friend went thru his Grandmother's books after her
| death. Found hundreds in 'old Shekels' among the pages. Saving
| against some disaster I imagine.
|
| Except they were worthless - there was an amnesty for turning
| them in, that had expired decades ago.
| LegitShady wrote:
| My mom once told me (morbidly so i guess) that when she passes
| to flip through all the books and check all her cd cases. I
| guess that's where she keeps her emergency cash as well.
| balentio wrote:
| Sixty bucks in a Percy Jackson Lightning Thief book. I mean, was
| it stolen? Was it signaling? What was it?
| O__________O wrote:
| Strangest thing I ever found in a book was a unexpired unused
| sealed condom pack in a religious book in a hotel nightstand;
| normally search my hotel rooms to make sure there no obvious
| things that shouldn't be there, were mistakenly left, etc.
| mutation wrote:
| A few years ago I got some books for free from a second-hand
| bookstore here in Zagreb, Croatia, where I live. One of those was
| a Real World OCaml book with a dedication from Jane Street Team
| to someone named Gustav. There were also some other books about
| functional programming given for free. I guess Gustav decided
| functional progamming wasn't for him, and just dumped those books
| to the first bookstore he could find.
|
| Also, a few years back, I borrowed The Agebraist by Iain M. Banks
| from a local library and found his signature in there on the
| title page.
| thesimonlee wrote:
| Latin for Lawyers 2nd edition seems to be based on E. Hilton
| Jackson ( a lawyer) & Broom's Legal Maxims published 1937, sweet
| & maxwell
|
| (Book was from ebay, unread condition) Pasted inside front cover
| -
|
| This book is a typical text excercise book from the years between
| the two world wars! It is almost useless in imparting any
| understanding of the subject. Almost all books on any subject
| tended to be like this and students often had to battle to make
| sense of incomprehendible texts. Even with the help of of a tutor
| it is difficult to see how anyone could follow it. Anyone trying
| to use it alone would entirely be lost and confused. There is no
| account of how to use it, no help with following the numbering
| system, and above all no ANSWERS! Even someone with a school
| grounding in Latin would have difficulty.
|
| It is a fine example of the dry, pedantic and often unhelpful
| attitude of the time in the teaching profession where simple
| facts were often presented in an unnecessarily convoluted way,
| simply it seems because this was the academic fashion This habit
| only died out after WWII It has a parallel in the Victorian.habit
| of giving quite ordinary toys elaborate Greek names, such as the
| Phenakistoscope!
| irrational wrote:
| Localhost ip address has to be one of the strangest things ever
| found in a book.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/wf3e99/r...
| happyopossum wrote:
| Nitpicky point here, but that's not localhost - localhost is
| typically 127.0.0.1 (although the entire /8 is reserved for
| loopback use, this is the only address defined in a typical
| hosts file).
| chinathrow wrote:
| That's not localhost, that's an IP address reserved for private
| networks. Looks like the IP of a home router or something like
| that to me.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network
| smm11 wrote:
| A few weeks back I took a book to a nearby Little Library. I
| hadn't opened the book since 1987, when I was in college, but
| held onto it for reasons.
|
| Right before I dropped it off in exchange for another I wanted, I
| thumbed through for some unknown reason. Inside was a note from a
| girl I knew in high school, who I'd drifted apart from somewhat.
| It was agreeing to my plan to:
|
| Have her move 2000 miles to where I was going to school. Marry in
| 1990.
|
| I'd not seen the note in 1987, nor any time after, nor heard from
| her ever again - she presumably put that note there in late-1986,
| right about when we ended it. Long story, she was in town.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Now that you've got all of HN on tenterhooks what happened
| since?
| pugworthy wrote:
| I have some old (1800's) student primers (textbooks) which I
| value for the doodles and illustrations past owners have done.
|
| Perhaps the most fascinating is a drawing of an early steamship
| with smokestack and paddle wheels, but also masts for sails. This
| style of ship didn't exist for that long, and some student long
| ago must have seen them and been fascinated by them enough to
| make the drawing in the book.
| imadethis wrote:
| If you haven't seen it yet, a relevant thread on Twitter from
| the Museum of English Rural Life:
| https://twitter.com/TheMERL/status/1048541160271237120
| h2odragon wrote:
| might want to make the link more specific:
| https://noctslackv2.wordpress.com/2022/08/02/whats-the-stran...
| ColinWright wrote:
| Calling @dang ...
|
| (URLs can't be edited by non-admins like me)
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Assuming you submitted the actual URL, it's a canonical link
| problem: <link rel="canonical">
|
| That's the canonical link in the page, which points to
| nothing. Which I'd guess HN rewrites as just the root (what
| is currently being pointed to).
| ColinWright wrote:
| I used the bookmarklet, and it's plausible that I was, at
| the time, viewing the blog root page (as linked here)
| rather than drilling down to the permalink.
|
| So it's likely to have been my mistake.
|
| _Edit: I 've emailed the mods._
|
| _Edit2: It 's been fixed._
| BlueGh0st wrote:
| As a teen, it was incredibly exciting to find a VA prescription
| blank dated 1940s in a first edition of Otto Fenichel's The
| Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis that I picked up at a thrift
| store.
| _pazta wrote:
| 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, ..."
| zola wrote:
| So... did you keep it?
| pedrosbmartins wrote:
| Once I stayed in an Airbnb owned by Karl Friederich Gauss'
| distant relatives in Brazil.
|
| It was a very cozy cabin in the mountains around Rio and I was
| celebrating a two-year anniversary with my girlfriend. There were
| a few books arranged in a short rack, mostly teen stuff, but one
| aged book stood out. It was an English version of Gauss' Theory
| of the Motion of the Heavenly Bodies, apparently borrowed from an
| university library in the 1970s but never returned. Inside, I
| found two documents from 1969, a voter registration and an exam
| card. They belonged to a woman with a Brazilian first name and
| Gauss' surname. Later, I had to transfer money to the Airbnb
| host, and she also had Gauss as a surname.
|
| I was pretty thrilled with the whole thing. My girlfriend was
| more entertained by the cabin's cat.
| bmitc wrote:
| While not really strange, I did find a book with the signature of
| John Archibald Wheeler, the famous physicist and advisor of
| people like Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, Charles Misner, and
| others, on the inside cover at a Half Price Books.
|
| I'm really happy I found that for some reason. He's one of my
| favorite scientists, and it just feels nice to have a book that
| he once had in his collection.
| marai2 wrote:
| What was the book?
| TedShiller wrote:
| wwarner wrote:
| I moved a few years ago and decided to sell a lot of books. I
| scanned the bar codes for about 50 and tried to sell them on
| Amzn. For my technical books, I learned that not matter how
| valuable the books were to me, they were worthless. However, I
| had some really valuable gems. One was a thick book of old
| Japanese lithographs, the explicit kind called "shunga". I
| sincerely don't know how I came to possess this book, but I sold
| it for $250. Another was self published by an old friend about
| his experience in the Seattle of the late 60s, which sold for
| $500.
| rurp wrote:
| I enjoy buying used books partly for the random items and marks.
| It's surprising how many old books include scribbled notes or
| underlined/highlighted sections. Sometimes the notations make
| sense, but often times I have no idea why a certain part was
| highlighted and have fun trying to figure out the connection
| between various marked passages.
|
| The most common item I've found is a receipt. Sometimes it will
| be for the book itself; often it will be totally unrelated,
| sometimes quite old.
|
| There is something enjoyable about having these little
| connections to a distant stranger as part of an otherwise
| solitary activity.
| aicswe wrote:
| The login for a rival collegiate football team's bangbros
| account.
| misterprime wrote:
| I love this story, and imagine that I would enjoy experiencing
| that. I'm skeptical that I'm even allowing something like that to
| happen, let alone being proactive about trying to make it happen.
| ComputerCat wrote:
| Such a heartwarming story, thanks for sharing. Sad though how
| people's beloved possessions can be discarded after death.
| Lio wrote:
| I have nothing constructive to say except how much I enjoyed
| reading this.
|
| Ild books are magic. If you find the right one going for a song
| it's like a gateway somewhere.
|
| I also love old maps, particularly Ordinance Survey ones.
| Wonderful things.
|
| Weirdest thing I've found in an old book? Squashed dead spider
| with the legs splayed out. Perfectly desiccated. :P
| willyt wrote:
| https://maps.nls.uk/
| gameshot911 wrote:
| How about an IP address[1]?
|
| [1]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/wf3e99/r...
| IshKebab wrote:
| Not very strange. Someone just pasted at the wrong point and
| didn't notice.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Normally an editor would catch that, but I think they've all
| departed for the Grey Havens. [1]
|
| 1: https://i.imgur.com/pevfen5.png
| 0x0 wrote:
| How boring, an RFC 1918 address. :-/
| SCUSKU wrote:
| Wow! What a beautiful story! Thank you for sharing this. On a
| side note, this is the kind of stuff I love about blogs, people
| sharing the nice, unexpected and serendipitous moments of life.
| rhema wrote:
| Once in a while, I see a cluster of books in a Goodwill or
| Salvation Army that are very niche. Like, 20 books on flyfishing
| among 200 books. I bet the most interesting people to meet have
| odd collections of books.
| globalise83 wrote:
| Those can be very valuable. I have a little library of
| Victorian angling books that someone will donate similarly, yet
| cost several hundreds to accumulate. As the saying goes: "pray
| your wife doesn't sell it for what you told her you paid for
| it"
| bluGill wrote:
| As I've got older though I'm starting to realize I don't care
| what my wife sells my stuff for after I'm gone. What I care
| about is she sells it to someone who wants it. I want my
| stuff sold to some collectors who will appreciate it, and not
| the scrap dealer. If the collector gets it for less than the
| scrap dealer will pay that would be fine with me. (and I
| think I'll leave my wife enough that she can afford to give
| it away like that)
| yetanotherloser wrote:
| I thought that saying was about a fellow's workshop tools?
| (not me, honest luv...) However, anyone who's dealt in
| rare/collectable/used ANYTHING has also run into the opposite
| problem: when someone's sure what they inherited is super
| valuable, and it's really not. Worse when it goes to waste
| because they want thousands for it and nobody sane will pay
| that, then they dump it out of spite. I probably ought to
| leave a note in the safe about which of my own things are
| worth appraising (not many) and which not to bother (99%).
| karmelapple wrote:
| A bar I frequented had books on every shelf on every wall. When
| visiting I usually wouldn't touch them, but once in awhile after
| a beverage I'd grab a random one and peek inside.
|
| One I opened had on the inside cover someone's full name and
| social security number.
|
| I brought it up to the bartender so they could rip out that page
| and throw it away.
|
| Was there a time when putting your SSN inside a book was common?
| galago wrote:
| In the 1930s there was no real reason to keep it secret.
| Tattoos:
|
| https://minarchist.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/social-security-...
| hbn wrote:
| I keep mine as a little note on my phone's lock screen so if
| it's ever lost, there's zero confusion as to who the true owner
| is!
| buildsjets wrote:
| When I went to college (graduated 1999) our SSN was our student
| ID. Professors used to publicly post our names, SSN, and grade
| on the bulletin board after exams.
| busterarm wrote:
| There's a book many in this community will know that has printed
| on its pages a CRISPR sequence for antibiotic-resistant E.coli
| [deleted]
| mortenlarsen wrote:
| In my "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" (the dragon
| book).
|
| A few National security Agency Post-Its with notes.
| Cook4986 wrote:
| From "A college mystery: the story of the apparition in the
| Fellows' Garden at Christ's College, Cambridge Baker, A. P / 2nd
| ed. 1925":
|
| https://youtu.be/5JDxyVpmbJA
| donatj wrote:
| I bought a Ti-92 graphing calculator in the early 2000's for very
| cheap, couple dollars, secondhand.
|
| I found this odd because at the time they still went for a lot of
| money. Inside the very large battery door[1] I found a person's
| name and phone number. I thought about contacting them to see if
| it was stolen, but first I googled the name and found a several
| month old local news article about the person dying in a
| helicopter crash of all things. Very strange.
|
| 1. https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/LSItvlpfiCKAvBIb
| justbaker wrote:
| Sounds like an idea for a kids book, "The Haunted Calculator"
| motoboi wrote:
| Every calculation returns 666DEAD
| mongol wrote:
| I once found, in a second hand birding book (Collins Guide /
| Fagelguiden), a "congratulations to your degree"-card with an
| embossed crown on it, signed by Frida + Ruzzo. Some additional
| details lead me to the conclusion it was written by Anni-Frid
| Lyngstad of ABBA. (Ruzzo was Frida's late husband, who was prince
| of House of Reuss)
| mod wrote:
| In a much smaller coincidence, I read this during a traffic jam
| in Sarasota along the same route Charles probably drove.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Wonderful story. And I think I have a speck of dust in my eye.
| Phileosopher wrote:
| I think I have the same problem. It's a known interface issue,
| haven't found a fix for it, but apparently the bug can be
| implemented as a feature.
| Morizero wrote:
| This kind of remark is a reinforcement of the idea that "it's
| not ok to cry", rather than a cutesy way of saying that you're
| tearing up.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| In 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...
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| I doubt a librarian would tell you who checks out what books.
| ska wrote:
| No but they might try and contact them for you (context
| dependent).
| jccalhoun wrote:
| no but they could have contacted the person and let them know
| trebbble wrote:
| Not that long ago, that info was right on the card in the
| back or front of the book. Unless the card had just been
| replaced.
| al_be_back wrote:
| Bought a book at a lovely 2nd-hand bookstore in Utrecht,
| Netherlands - reading it weeks later I noticed there was a 1.5
| inch wooden-wedge jammed tight into the gutter. It's still there.
|
| That's one serious bookmark!
| myth_drannon wrote:
| The moral of the story is talk to your siblings from time to
| time!
| therouwboat wrote:
| Some folks call number they found on old business card and some
| people don't even call their relatives. :)
| sammalloy wrote:
| 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
| selected looting of downtown, and the then mayor imposing a
| curfew and limiting movement for the night.
|
| I remember that I had picked up a copy of Nathanael West's novel
| "The Day of the Locust" (1939) about a week before the riots. I
| was downtown when the riots broke out, and I had just gotten to
| the end of the book when the riots occurred in the story just as
| they were happening all around me.
|
| If you think that's strange, it gets even stranger. In the book,
| the riots occur in Los Angeles during a film premiere and the
| narrator is surprised because it reminds him of a painting he
| made titled "The Burning of Los Angeles".
| [deleted]
| waltwalther wrote:
| I have been fascinated with books for as long as I can remember.
| In the early seventies we were one of the only families that I
| knew of who had an encyclopedia set, and we had both World Book
| and Britannica. I loved looking through those pages and learning
| things about the world.
|
| The first book that was ever mine, was an old copy of Dale
| Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, given to me
| by my grandfather, who, and I do not know why I remember this,
| had just taught me the meaning of the word diplomatic. I was in
| first grade.
|
| My grandfather, who was a blue collar lineman for the university,
| was always coming home with books, both new and used. I inherited
| his collection when he passed away in the early nineties. I
| still-to-this-day find little notes written in the margins and
| sometimes newspaper clippings inserted in between the pages..just
| waiting to be found.
| klondike_klive wrote:
| 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 why!"
|
| Makes me miss him more.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I wrote about this once before, but I had a very similar
| situation, except with family photos instead of books. The story
| was that someone's apartment was cleared out after they were
| evicted. Well, after a few years of the stuff sitting in storage,
| I got around to looking through it, and with a bit of sleuthing,
| I tracked down the person who the family photos belonged to and
| gave them a call.
|
| The call did not go well. It is certainly possible that I could
| have approached the phone call better, and maybe I should have
| tried harder, but they were suspicious, rude, and quite possibly
| upset. So I never took the family photos to them, and eventually
| disposed of them.
|
| You really never know how people will respond to having their
| past thrust at them like this. Or how they'll respond to strange
| phone calls.
| O__________O wrote:
| True, though sometimes it works out.
|
| Found a diary hidden in attic and after some research was able
| to track down the owner and return it; they were happy and
| enjoyed getting it back.
| fffrrrr wrote:
| In the 80's my family lost a suitcase of family photos and
| letters. Literally fell of a truck in the middle of Siberia. a
| few year later they were reunited with them thanks to a
| stranger who found them and tracked my family down (obviously
| this was pre-internet). My family was very grateful.
| emmelaich wrote:
| I found a bunch of books and photo albums sitting out for
| garbage collection.
|
| The albums were full of family photos stretching over years. I
| tracked down the owner via facebook. She had moved to another
| country and -- I suspect had separated from her husband.
|
| She was not interested in the photo albums. It seemed rather
| poignant. I wonder what the story was behind it.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _You really never know how people will respond to having their
| past thrust at them like this. Or how they 'll respond to
| strange phone calls._
|
| I've bought many books over the years that had prior owner's
| names marked inside somewhere. On a few occasions I've bothered
| to try and identify/find the person in question. Once or twice
| I was successful, but I never bothered contacting them just to
| say "Hey, I bought this book you used to own". Well, except for
| one time.
|
| I was on an Inductive Logic Programming / Prolog kick, and
| bought several used books on the subject. Something like two or
| three had all been owned by the same previous owner. I looked
| him up and found out that he was an academic and appeared to
| still be working, so I thought "what the heck" and sent him a
| note just to say "Hey, funny story, I bought these books and
| <blah, blah, blah>."
|
| Not sure what I expected, if anything, in return, but the
| response I did get was quite chilly. It was something along the
| lines of "Oh, I donated those to a place that was supposed to
| be sending them to Africa" or something like that. There was
| definitely no sense that this individual was happy to hear from
| the new owner of his old books, or was interested in discussing
| the subject.
|
| Which is fine. Like I said, I had no idea what to expect, and
| certainly would have had no right to expect any particular
| response. But it just goes to show... you are correct in saying
|
| _" You really never know how people will respond to having
| their past thrust at them like this. Or how they'll respond to
| strange phone calls."_ (or strange emails in this case)
| 13of40 wrote:
| When I was young, my collection of books ebbed and flowed
| based on how much spare cash I had. In lean times, I'd end up
| selling them, then eventually accumulate more. Once I got my
| career on a more consistent path, I collected books and ended
| up with a pretty diverse set, but in the back of my head I
| used the fact that I hadn't sold them as a barometer for my
| financial stability. Anyway, a couple of years ago, at the
| behest of my wife, I went through and culled about 1/3 of
| them. Took them to Half Price Books, where I was offered $8
| for the lot. At first I was a little taken aback by that
| price, but then I realized I was handing them a box of the
| shittiest books I owned. If anyone doxes me to tell me how
| lovely their third-hand copy of Chilton's 1984 Audi 4000
| manual is...I mean I would congratulate them for their
| effort, but I don't exactly sit around pining about a
| reconnection to that book.
| Zancarius wrote:
| 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
| another assignment went under. I'd imagine they'd both have
| been amazed, surprised, and incredibly grateful for someone to
| have gone through the trouble you did.
|
| ...but who knows? Perhaps there was a divorce or bad blood in
| that family. At least you can say for certain you have a clear
| conscience, though!
| trebbble wrote:
| > 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 problem
| for folks in the military even if something weird like the
| moving company going under mid-move doesn't happen.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Dozens of leaves from different kinds of trees, pressed between
| the pages.
|
| I found it at a yardsale. Apparently collecting leaves and
| flowers like this is a hobby.
| em-bee wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_collecting
| zanethomas wrote:
| Bookworms. Really. Had a very old dictionary with bookworms!
| shagie wrote:
| Yesterday heard an NPR story on a similar topic - A librarian
| collects all the things left in books -- from love letters to old
| photos -- https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1114851706
|
| The WaPo article - Librarian finds love notes, doodles in books
| and shares them with a grateful public -- https://wapo.st/3SjGKNv
| topkai22 wrote:
| Years after his passing, I was going through some books I
| inherited from my grandpa and a picture of him and myself as a
| little boy fell out.
|
| He'd used it as a bookmark I guess, but I felt profoundly loved
| and grateful. I miss him.
| willis936 wrote:
| My favorite grad student bar is "The Library". The walls are
| lined with books. If you know the right two books you can find
| decks of vintage porn playing cards. Not that soft stuff either,
| these would make sailors blush.
| contingencies wrote:
| Someone's antique pay packet in New Zealand pounds which had been
| taken out of circulation.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I went through a phase of reading plays, usually collected in
| used paperback books. In one of them I found a receipt from a
| florist. It was made out to a well-known comic book writer and
| was for flowers he sent to his mother. Unexpected and wholesome.
| glfharris wrote:
| I have an interest in medical books from the first half of the
| 20th Century. It's fascinating what you can find, even in books
| that have been passed through many sets of hands.
|
| In one, I found a stockbrocker's letter and managed to trace the
| owner to his historic pubmed articles (all > 100 years old), as
| well as obituaries and probable descendants on WikiTree.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Not the strangest thing in the world, but I'm currently on a Mark
| Twain reading binge. He's absolutely amazing - if all you've read
| of his is Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, you need to read his
| non-fiction travelogues. His observations were prescient almost
| beyond belief, and his acerbic humor is laugh out loud funny.
|
| Here's the strange bit: His book "Roughing It" is about his
| experience as a young man of moving to the West, spending a few
| years in Nevada and San Francisco, and then visiting The Kingdom
| of Hawaii where he tried _surfing_. In _1865_.
|
| > _In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of
| both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national
| pastime of surf-bathing. Each heathen would paddle three or four
| hundred yards out to sea, (taking a short board with him), then
| face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to
| come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its
| foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come
| whizzing by like a bombshell! It did not seem that a lightning
| express train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed. I
| tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it.
| I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but
| missed the connection myself.--The board struck the shore in
| three quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the
| bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in
| me. None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing
| thoroughly._
|
| Sam embraced and exaggerated his "Southern gentleman" Mark Twain
| persona later in life so much, the idea that earlier in life he
| was in Hawaii, hanging out and surfing is quite amusing to me.
| Victorian surfing?? Who knew?
| geocrasher wrote:
| "Roughing It" is one of my all time favorite books. I grew up
| around Virginia City (Reno/Carson) and will be moving back to
| that region in a couple of weeks. It remains one of my favorite
| books. I need to give it another read.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Nice! I live in the Bay Area and been to Tahoe a bunch of
| times, though never to the Nevada side. I didn't know
| anything about the Comstock Lode besides the name. It's an
| amazing story. But is Virginia City just sitting on top of a
| massive empty mine to this day??
|
| Twain's descriptions of how empty Tahoe was then are pretty
| incredible to imagine. He guessed that they may have been the
| only people camping on the lake at the time.
|
| The part where he accidentally starts a raging forest fire
| that spreads over the mountains is much less humorous today,
| I have to admit. Hopefully it was one of the times he was
| exaggerating for effect.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Oh man, you have got to visit Virginia City. Yes, it's
| really sitting on top of mines. And you can do some mine
| tours. It's a bit on the touristy side, but I have a
| picture of me and my family visiting there in the early
| 80's, and then another pic from almost the same spot (quite
| coincidentally!) just a couple of months ago, and not a lot
| has changed.
|
| There are also excellent museums in Carson City. And, you
| can take the train from VC down to CC! Something I have yet
| to do, but am going to do soon.
|
| If you need a local contact, hit me up. username at gmail.
| danielodievich wrote:
| In 10th grade I wasn't sure I could register to a chemistry with
| one teacher so I didn't. But when school started, the teacher who
| was supposed to teach the class was different and accepted me
| into the class. However, I didn't anticipate needing the
| textbook, so she sent me back to the class library where there
| was some hard-worn copies of various classbooks. I was in luck
| that the book she wanted me to have was there, but it was really,
| really worn out, and written all over. But beggars can't be
| choosers, so I took what was there for me.
|
| Well, going through the class I've discovered that all the
| writing on the margins was actually incredibly useful! I followed
| them whenever I could, and when we were doing routine chemistry
| experiments measuring pH of acids and playing with precipitation,
| my experiments miraculously came up with new varieties of teflon
| coating! While everyone else's salt crystals looked boring, I was
| able to grow fabulous Bismuth crystals. My class mates grew
| suspicious of my prowess since previously I showed no aptitude to
| chemistry. After an altercation with one of other jealous
| students, I realized that I had to hide the book somewhere safe,
| and it is likely still sitting in the back closet of the school's
| cafeteria waiting for next lucky student.
| rfvisuals wrote:
| A butterfly. I opened a book (can't remember title) at a library
| over 15 years ago and a butterfly came out of the pages and
| landed on my shoulder.
| parenthesis wrote:
| I've commented on this before
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2670735):
|
| In the late 2000s, inside a university library copy of the 2003
| edition of the Clocksin and Mellish book _Programming in Prolog_
| I found a print-out (dot-matrix, by the look of it) of an email
| sent in 1988 from one of the authors of the book to the other,
| regarding how to revise it for a future edition.
| grapescheesee wrote:
| Years 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 looking something up for fun. It was not a
| book I had touched yet, and I found the following letter hand
| written on a sheet of lined notebook paper. I found it oddly
| interesting and tried looking the names a few times. I did not
| get anywhere near the article story, wish I had.
|
| "Being of sound mind and body, declare this to be my last will
| and testament.
|
| To my mother, I leave nothing.
|
| To my father, I leave Farrah and the wish to be cremated and
| scattered over aspen, Colorado.
|
| To Rhonda Sollberger, I leave my cat, puffer, my rabbit, Oliver,
| my model house collection, and my stereo.
|
| To Tony I leave Karen.
|
| To Karen I leave Tony.
|
| To Gail, I leave my teddy bear, and my rainbow sweater (She'll
| grow into it soon.)
|
| To Heather Bright, I leave my Canada Dry can, and my tequila
| bottle.
|
| To Mark Frang, I leave him feeling guilty and gray skico. Also
| some of my ashes are to be sprinkled in his room, to remind him
| the sad that I am not here is all his fault.
|
| To Adheimme Boman, I leave all the items in my play house that
| belong to her. 13235 is the combination.
|
| To Todd Glass, I leave my Muppit poster (It's just his type!)
|
| To my Grandparents, I leave fond memories.
|
| Signed. Jeanne Gammon Witness. Rhonda Sollberger"
| LeonTheremin wrote:
| Found a space between two pages to hide money - so good a place
| to hide money I myself never found these bills again.
| ThorInAVillage wrote:
| RajT88 wrote:
| I am not trolling here, just for posterity. =)
|
| I once bought about a dozen Doctor Who paperbacks at a garage
| sale. This was probably 1995.
|
| Half of them contained mysterious hand-written notes which
| related to "keys".
|
| Cryptic sentences on each paper like, "The fifth key is hard to
| find, and has many chilly neighbors".
|
| To this day, I have no idea what it was about. Maybe the books
| and notes are on a shelf at my parent's house somewhere, and I'll
| take another pass at it some day.
|
| ETA: Possibly references to this serial:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_of_Marinus#Plot
|
| Which had 0 to do with any of the books, as I recall. I would
| swear there was more than 5 notes about keys as well. Guess I'll
| have to dig them up and find out.
| hammock wrote:
| Hidden in the fridge somewhere
| r00fus wrote:
| Sounds like something my kids would do to keep each other
| entertained on a long trip to see family. Perhaps it's just a
| treasure hunt?
| smarri wrote:
| Let's have a part 2, his life story! You teased us with that:)
| Alpi wrote:
| Oh I found a golden card from Magic the Gathering
| zw123456 wrote:
| I know this isn't what you meant, but I was at a garage sale, and
| they had a stack of old books, one had a hollowed-out compartment
| in it that contained a "sex toy". I asked the proprietor of the
| garage sale where the books came from, and she said they were her
| fathers and he passed away and no one wanted them.
|
| I put the book back and didn't say anything.
| pfarrell wrote:
| I think that's perfectly in line with what they meant. I
| certainly don't have a story like that.
| daviddaviddavid wrote:
| 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 pizzeria and they accidentally
| made too many pies and gave me an extra large pie for free. I was
| on a roll.
| jnovek wrote:
| I want this story to continue, and for each of the five
| twenties that you spend, some increasingly elaborate and
| unlikely good thing happens.
| acomjean wrote:
| I went through a couple years where I was finding cash kind
| of a lot. Not life changing amounts, but something.
|
| 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.
|
| I found a twenty in the snow on the street in cambridge. But
| it was new snow and easy to follow the tracks. It led to the
| security guard at the University. He was really thankfully to
| have it back.
|
| Later that spring I found a crumpled $50 blowing down the
| street. It was near the faculty club. "Tumble Money" my
| partner said. Also 50s aren't really common. I kept 30 and
| donated 20 to charity.
|
| But lamentably my good fortune in the finding of cash has
| come to an end. Perhaps the rise of the credit card changed
| my fortunes.
| smadsen wrote:
| This goes back to when my daughter was little, many years
| pre-covid. Whenever we went to a pizza restaurant that had
| a mini arcade with games and vending machines, she would
| check all of the change return trays. And inevitably, she
| would come back with a quarter or two. Every time. I
| figured maybe it was luck coming from her Irish ancestry.
| floren wrote:
| > 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 table in the
| coffee area for a week... anybody could have picked them
| up, especially the security guards and janitors who roamed
| the building at night with nobody else around, but they
| just stayed there.
|
| Working in that sort of high-trust environment is really,
| really nice.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Very nice but what about repeating it with $100? :)
| floren wrote:
| 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"
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I found $20 on my block this morning in New Orleans. It
| belonged to my neighbor across the street fixing his car.
| He offered me a beer at 945 in the morning. I guess this
| city is a high trust environment :D
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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...
| amelius wrote:
| If you avoid luck, then you will lead a very unhappy life ...
| currere wrote:
| Surely it's sufficient that someone else forgot the $100 in
| the book.
| danielodievich wrote:
| I lent one my cool science fiction books to a good friend, and
| once I got it back and decided to re-read it myself, found that
| he was using a $10 canadian as bookmark. It's one of my
| bookmarks now, although I may use it next time I go to
| Vancouver. Maybe. It's pleasantly plasticky in that ineffable
| "Canadien" way.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Cash is always interesting. Cash in a logic book too, that
| seems like clean money!
|
| One time in Japan there was a car sitting in front of my
| apartment for months, nobody used it, nobody touched it. It
| seemed abandoned. It definitely looked out of place due to its
| age as well, though it was in good shape.
|
| Eventually me and the pals got amused, and annoyed, and started
| to do funny stuff you'd only do if amused and annoyed by an
| abandoned car. Like, trying the doors on one restless day while
| you wait for the yakimo hours to arrive.
|
| Unlocked!
|
| A bunch of sports gear, cassettes.
|
| Hatchback?
|
| Sports gear...uh...sexy times stuff...and uh...a purse.
|
| A peek in the purse. My first time seeing thick bundles of
| cash, basically $100s! Stacks of 'em!
|
| I watched enough movies to know that loose $100s, found
| loosely, may be OK to take, or even just to ask somebody about.
|
| But bundles, in a purse, in an abandoned car, in a neighborhood
| where we had heard some organized crime rumors...nope.
|
| Creepy af though. We wondered if she had run away, disappeared,
| what.
| jansan wrote:
| My father once lost quite a large amount of cash that was
| supposed to be used for an overseas family trip. It was a very
| awkward situation in our family, because he had the slight
| suspicion that one of us children could have taken the money.
| Luckily, about a year later my brother opened a large book on
| seafaring from my fathers shelf and found an envelope with
| exactly the missing sum. Only then my father remembered that he
| had hidden the money there and we could procees with our
| holiday plannings.
| massysett wrote:
| 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.
| a9h74j wrote:
| > the first $20 I spent was to get a pizza
|
| Story would be even better if you had traded the pizza for 10
| bitcoin.
| MollyRealized wrote:
| Hope this gets traction, it's a real nice story yet not glurge.
| bondolo wrote:
| I found an old sheep intestine condom in a 19th century
| engineering reference book. The pages where I found it had been
| water damaged, likely, I later learned, from the condom having
| been washed after use and put in the book to dry and then
| forgotten. Condoms were expensive at the time and frequently
| reused.
|
| I did not keep either the condom or the book.
| zahma wrote:
| How to synthesize methamphetamine. It was in my organic chemistry
| textbook.
| gcheong wrote:
| Gotta pay for those textbooks somehow!
| blueflow wrote:
| In my copy of "Advanced MS-DOS" by Ray Duncan, on the backside of
| the cover page is written:
|
| > To Pete:
|
| > Happy Birthday
|
| > From David + Kal,
|
| > (can i have my copy back now please?)
| lostlogin wrote:
| The following story about gunpowder is good too.
| ask_b123 wrote:
| It was nice! Thanks for pointing it out.
| rendleflag wrote:
| In a book I found at Goodwill back in 94/95 there was a 8x10
| photo of an orangutan sitting alone in a metal cage. It wasn't a
| part of a book and the book wasn't about apes or zoos or anything
| related, it was just a random photo someone had stuck in there. I
| asked how much for the photo, and they gave it to me. I still
| have it in a box in my office.
| Wistar wrote:
| Although not really strange, I bought a copy of Green Mansions
| from a rural, and dingy, old used book store. Stuck deeply in the
| pages were a bunch of silver certificates of several
| denominations dating from the 1920s and 30s, through the 1950s.
| Face value well into the hundreds of dollars. Still have them.
| Turns out the book itself is a first edition from 1904. Still
| have it, too.
| tomcam wrote:
| 1. 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 place to read, and it had a little concourse named Luna
| Park. Inside it was a random coin-op machine named Luna Park, not
| related to the concourse from what I could tell.
|
| 3. I was studying songs by the lyricist Jule Stein, a New Yorker.
| One day I went into a used bookshop on the other side of the
| country in Newport Beach, CA just to browse. I found a bunch of
| books with his bookplate in them. (Nothing musical, sadly.)
| em-bee wrote:
| * 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?
| tomcam wrote:
| 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
|
| https://wellcomecollection.org/works/bhdnhcu4
|
| https://wellcomecollection.org/works/x9av6dsf
| registeredcorn wrote:
| 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!
| crabbygrabby wrote:
| Love this story. Probably money I hid when I was a kid
| rendleflag wrote:
| Back in 94/95 at Goodwill I was thumbing through some random book
| and there was a 8x10 photo of an orangutan sitting alone in a
| metal cage. It wasn't a part of a book and the book wasn't about
| apes or zoos or anything related, it was just a random photo
| someone had stuck in there. I asked how much for the photo, and
| they gave it to me. I still have it in a box in my office.
| ska wrote:
| IME it's pretty common to find stuff like this (photos,
| receipts, napkins, etc.) used as impromptu bookmark and
| "swallowed" at some point so not obvious it's there.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| In the mid-80s, I found a $50 silver certificate in a book in my
| local public library. I turned it in to the librarian, with the
| book.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I was not expecting the thing to be "a new friend".
| swayvil wrote:
| I found an advertisement for cigarettes in the middle of
| Creatures of Light and Darkness.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| 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
| trebbble wrote:
| Lots of older pulp paperbacks have a couple glossy pages of ads
| in the middle (usually bound-in, though, not loose) and more
| often than not, they're cigarette ads.
| [deleted]
| type0 wrote:
| A postcard from about 100 years ago, a woman was greeting her
| friend about how nice it to have annual leave during summer,
| basically bragging about it, found it in a book that I bought at
| the thrift store.
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