June 08, 2008

Found in books "Be careful what you use as a bookmark. Thousands of dollars, a Christmas card signed by Frank Baum, a Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card, a marriage certificate from 1879, a baby’s tooth, a diamond ring and a handwritten poem by Irish writer Katharine Tynan Hickson are just some of the stranger objects discovered inside books by AbeBooks.com booksellers." .

Also along the lines of found ephemera: ifoundyourcamera. Cameras lost, hopefully reunited with their owners via their mysterious photos. I'm really into lost and found lately, I guess. Both via Found Magazine's "Found" Blog.

posted by Lara 15 years ago
  • Wow, cool! I love finding stuff in used books, but th most interesting thing I ever found was an old subway ticket.
  • I found a photograph that really shouldn't have been left in a library book. Fortunately, I didn't recognize the parties involved.
  • I found a library card in a library book. When I returned it to the library, it turned out it was a librarian's library card.
  • In a 150-year old housekeeping book that my sister ordered online for me, we discovered a few horseracing tickets from Ireland from the 1920s, as well as numerous newspaper clippings about a race car driver that was murdered in the 1940s. I gave the horseracing tickets to a friend that collects horseracing memorabilia and he was very happy.
  • Neat!
  • I once found a hole in an old book I wished to purchased from an antiquarian book seller located in a back alley in Lucknow. It was the monsoon season and thus I spent an inordinate time perusing said work in order to give time for my covered rickshaw-walla to return and collect me. Upon futher investigating the hole, I found that it lead my eye through a tunnel covered with mosses and other green growth of which I had no knowledge. As I travelled inward through the tunnel, I passed a Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card floating in the air and then arrived at the other end of the tunnel. All was light, monkeys sporting with bananas, a grandma riding her horse, a many colored being flapping a library card, a monster in peculiar underpants who was attempting to ride with an expired subway ticket, and a Lara who was both lost and found. I looked around, I did the hoochie-koochie, I defraged my mind...and decide it was good...life was as it should be and was very very good.
  • I found a ghost, something one apparently cannot find in online prose.
  • Watch it, you!
  • Whose turn was it to watch stirfry? The little dickens has been smoking banana peels again.
  • I have never found anything of any interest in a used book. Just dubious stains.
  • ...most interesting thing I ever found was an old subway ticket TUM, if that ticket is a London Underground 1986 "single" from Harlesden to Old Brompton Road, and if the book was Oliver Sacks' "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" then that ticket might well be... not mine. Kit, if those dubious stains... (etc.)
  • I have never found anything of any interest in a used book. Just dubious stains. You might if you read books that didn't have any pictures. Or titles like "Housewives' Juggs".
  • Kitfisto: Were they in the same book I had with the photograph?
  • Thieving bastards! Just kidding. We're just ahead of our time :)
  • The only thing I ever found in a book was a faded red rose from days gone by. It was a dictionary. The winsome bud marked the page where the word "love" lay defined. A wisp o' memory from a romance long dead, i imagine. But then I took a closer look and it wasn't a red flower, it was a squished bug. Yuk! So I glued those pages together. Now I'll never know the definitions of "lousewort" because it's in the stuck pages along with the bug.
  • That must have been *snort* the *snicker* Love Bug!!!!11!!! GUFFAW! Ah, I slay me.
  • Ooooooh, kit's in troub-ble!
  • Detentions for everyone!
  • *grumbles*