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

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.

> 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.

[1] https://www.mscroggs.co.uk/blog/tags/books (halfway down has a photo of the Scientific American issue)

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.

When you are reading the comic book, right as you come across the scene where the heroes open the book, when you turn to the next page the same scrap of paper seen in that scene falls out of the actual book you're holding. That sent chills down my spine when I first encountered it; pretty genius.

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“

I bought it used on Amazon. It was an old library book that still had the sleeve and index cards with the date stamps of when it was last checked out.

This particular book, that I bought sight unseen from Amazon, used, for my brother's birthday had only been checked out once in its life at the library. It was last checked out on my brother's exact birthday. The book I randomly bought him had a stamp of his exact birthday, only.

Talk about going from thinking we're so small in the universe to that kind of coincidence.

Edited to fix a misspelling

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

    Ambassador Douglas (in pencil)

    Geyelin,
      4511 Cath. Ave. N.W. (in pen)

In 1947, Philip L. Geyelin, then working at the Wall Street Journal, gave the book as a gift to Lewis Williams Douglas, who had recently become the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom. (Geyelin had joined the Journal in 1946 and probably would have known the book's author, Henry Hazlitt, who was also at the Journal at that time.) My hunch is that the book was given to influence Douglas's thinking about economic policies that should be adopted to restore the UK and Europe after World War II.

As it turned out, Douglas was instrumental to the passage and implementation of the Marshall Plan.

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.)

I put the book back and didn't say anything.

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.

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.

I did not keep either the condom or the book.

I found a book on Visual Basic, ironically that language is what I work in today as it's an older legacy application. This book was quite passé even for it's release, however it was a big mega-tome of information concerning version 4. The previous owner left a few notes in the margins where he would write odd musings, probably when he had them as he was studying the drab text (truly was the most boring book on the subject I've ever found) it was one of these that I found a strange comment. He detailed a woman's features, didn't come off as creepy, just kind of odd; long black hair, lovely soft brown eyes, fair skin, etc. followed by a comment to the effect of, "writing it down now, since she'll be gone." and that hit different. You could tell by how he was writing that he was quite emotional.

It's a moment that clearly communicates the the one who finds the note that he had lost that race, too bad, he seemed to really take to her.

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.

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.

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.

Except they were worthless - there was an amnesty for turning them in, that had expired decades ago.

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.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/wf3e99/r...

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.

I guess the artist who made it was trying to say something, but I couldn’t tell what. Order matters? Books are a fraud? Maybe the punchline for a joke, “here is the book you ordered! Get it? Ordered!”

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.

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.

The WaPo article - Librarian finds love notes, doodles in books and shares them with a grateful public -- https://wapo.st/3SjGKNv

The inscription reads: "Phil - here's the latest opus - Watts"

Apparently the lyrics to Sheryl Crow's "All I wanna do" song were taken from a poetry book found in a second hand book store.

After the song hit, the poet got sued by the person he'd based the character of Bill on.

> The lyrics of the song are based on the poem "Fun" by Wyn Cooper.[1][2][3][4] Cooper was inspired to write the poem by a conversation at a bar with a friend and occasional writer, Bill Ripley,[5][6] in which he said "All I want is to have a little fun before I die", which became the first line of the poem. In a 1994 interview, Cooper said: "The poem isn't really about him. Or me. They're different people. They're people you can sort of see as ... well ... objective correlatives. Symbols of people like us, or what we could have been, or what we would have become if we continued to drink and do nothing with our lives."[7][8]

> Toad Hall Studio, where the song was recorded, was next door to the Pasadena Playhouse.[9][10] Crow's producer (Bottrell) discovered Cooper's poetry book The Country of Here Below in a nearby used bookstore in Pasadena, California. Crow had written a song called "I Still Love You" but was unhappy with its lyrics; she used its melody and adapted the poem for her lyrics to "All I Wanna Do".

> The song earned Cooper considerable royalties and helped to promote his book, originally published in a run of only 500 copies in 1987, into multiple reprints.[7] After the song became popular, Ripley brought an unsuccessful lawsuit against Cooper for some of the song's royalties, which ended their friendship.[7][11]

(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!

Every time I pick that book up I get reminded of that bill, and haven't been able to finish the book as yet.

I could never exactly figure out his motivations but I like to think that there was some sort of commemoration going on in town and he hired the flight just to have people know what a plane was like. It happened in a very rural area of Brazil, in a town that by time that had not more than 1000 habitants, no television, no paved roads, almost nothing.

I found a copy of a book called, "You are becoming a Galactic Human":

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/you-are-becoming-a-galactic-hu...

Which was weird, but that's not the strangest thing I've ever found IN a book.

That spotlight belongs to a thrifted copy of "Be Here Now" by Ram Dass:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41580312-be-here-now

Which is also a very strange and interesting book, but inside of it, bought from a thrift store, I found a pressed Marijuana leaf, which I still have. I would have thought that they would at least riffle the pages of the books to make sure there was no money or anything in it but somehow this leaf slipped through.

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".

...obviously I never tried to SSH into that box.

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.

He’d used it as a bookmark I guess, but I felt profoundly loved and grateful. I miss him.

That's one serious bookmark!

We went to a few different Goodwills around town, and while the idea was exciting- it turned dark quickly when we discovered the research notes of a man who had been diagnosed with cancer. It appeared he was not going to win the battle, and he knew it. Perhaps this was his way of coping, but from the state of the medial book it appeared he did not win the battle. I don't think the zine was ever published.

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.

Hand writing in books is super underrated. Underlining, summarizations, etc. are all really useful. I love when I have an old technical book that has a passage I can’t understand and then some stranger from years ago who did figure out what the author was conveying explains it in their own words in the margin.

Write notes in the books you own and buy books that have notes in them.

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.

  (I
      (BE
          (NOT
              (RATHER
                       (WOULD))))
      (PROGRAMMING
          (LISP IN)))

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?

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/wf3e99/r...

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

I had homework assignments that required analyzing color-coded diagrams in the book. Except the international edition was printed in black and white!

"God bless you, Jane!"

I couldn't have agreed more, and found the defacement entirely justified.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWFeC5ZqiRo

http://www.eddiemuller.com/inquisitor.html

The older actress in this is Marsha Hunt, a remarkable woman. She was 89 in this short. She's still alive today, 104, living in a house she's owned since 1946.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsha_Hunt_(actress,_born_191...

No, really. Estate sale, found an interesting pile of novels. Got home, a letter drops out of one from Pope John Paul to a friend. They were using it as a bookmark. Very odd.

I found it at a yardsale. Apparently collecting leaves and flowers like this is a hobby.

> To Pete:

> Happy Birthday

> From David + Kal,

> (can i have my copy back now please?)

"It is a good thing to travel thus in company — sometimes."

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/02/1114851706/library-notes-book...

In a German book, some tickets to a movie theater, and a clipping about the more or less covert revival of university dueling societies in the 1950s.

The author joked that he had suggested additional CPU instructions to Commodore that weren’t accepted, such as LGN - Let’s Get Naked. In a kid’s book.

https://youtu.be/5JDxyVpmbJA

A few National security Agency Post-Its with notes.

Thank you.