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

• stelliosk 4y ago
  So far has anyone made a necromonicon joke?
• lettergram 4y ago
  QR code in a kids book that redirected to a porn site...
• MisterMower 4y ago
  I found a $100 treasury bill in a Goodwill book a few years ago. It had some lady’s SS number and address on it. Date was 1973, so $100 was not a small deal. 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.
• satisfice 4y ago
  A book I found in a design store in Helsinki consisted of an entire novel (one of Dickens’, I think) that had been sorted, word by word, into alphabetical order. For example, all the “the’s” were grouped together. 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!”
  • adrianh 4y ago
    Related: the Well-Sorted Version (https://www.wellsortedversion.com/ https://www.wellsortedversion.com/) does this for the King James Bible. It's each word, alphabetized.
• andbberger 4y ago
  in college I retrieved a copy of waiting for godot from the bowels of main stacks at the recommendation of my girlfriend and found a note on the jacket from another person of the same name (an uncommon one at that) who had recommended it to her beau.
• jethkl 4y ago
  Tens of millions of German marks. They were stashed between the pages of a book, and they came from the era of hyperinflation during the 1920s.
• booknotefinder 4y ago
  In a used copy of William Kent’s Data and Reality, I found a 3x5” index card with a handwritten note in blue highlighter. On one side, “It’s who you know, not what you can do.” On the back, “Listen to your fucking conscience.” I always wonder what the story was there. It didn’t feel like a note to self; perhaps a warning for young programmers?
• technick 4y ago
  A credit card generator and recipes for making thermite and other improvised homemade elixirs.
  • xpe 4y ago
    Do tell. Were these things the subject of the book? Or some kind of hidden paper tucked away inside, left there for some now-unknown purpose, hidden and dormant for 19 years in a dusty attic in upstate New York, only later retrieved by Frans Bortenharfer?
• kgeist 4y ago
  I once found a love poem hidden between the pages of a German dictionary. It was written by grandfather and dedicated to grandmother. He commited suicide in the 1970's and grandmother never knew about this poem, so to her it was like a little message from him years later.
• js2 4y ago
  This reminds me of a short noir film, The Grand Inquisitor, by Eddie Muller (the film noir expert) that I just watched a couple days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWFeC5ZqiRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWFeC5ZqiRo http://www.eddiemuller.com/inquisitor.html 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_1917) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsha_Hunt_(actress,_born_191...
• jmpman 4y ago
  It was a book by masters and Johnson, in a college library. Um..
• heavyset_go 4y ago
  I borrowed a book from a teacher's book shelf in high school and it had notes about her plans to divorce her husband along with her reasons for doing so.
• pm3003 4y ago
  Long and personal dedicace from General De Gaulle to a Free French fighter.
• deleted 4y ago
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• deleted 4y ago
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• BoumTAC 4y ago
  In a book bought on Amazon I found a 50 dollars check as a gift. Unfortunately the book was coming from US and I can't use the check in Europe. But it still fun to receive it and I have kept it in my drawer
• needle0 4y ago
  There was a manga comic series called "20th Century Boys" which was a conspiracy thriller mixed with 1970s Japanese nostalgia. One of the story's scenes involved the protagonists rummaging through a library looking for a particular book. When they find the book and open it, a scrap of paper from decades ago falls out, which happens to be the vital clue to move the plot forward. 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.
• Poppys 4y ago
  Nobody talking about the "Sister Mary Himmler says, Zere Will Be A Quiz on Zis" with a nun wearing a swastika armband image in the sidebar?
  • napworth 4y ago
    Came to the comments to see if anyone is.
  • cfeduke 4y ago
    Yes, this is... just weird. And she has an SS Death's Head on her headband.
• jdblair 4y ago
  This is something I left in a book. I keep Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment on my desk, more out of nostalgia than anything. I flipped through it one day and found the receipt ($56!) from when I bought it, in 1995, at a Barnes and Noble in a strip mall outside Cincinnati. I bought it on the way home from my summer job. I had to implement a simple database, and browsing the stacks it looked like the best option. I learned so much from it, but not about databases! There are still sticky notes on all of the sections about file descriptors.
• RaSoJo 4y ago
  Not exactly strange, but found something quite depressing. A second hand book that I bought 5 years back had a medical bill with multiple cancer medications listed. The bill had the age and name of the patient - a man in his 20s. To me, it felt like he'd sold the book to cover his medical expenses. Every time I pick that book up I get reminded of that bill, and haven't been able to finish the book as yet.
• pseingatl 4y ago
  A desiccated bat, found in one of the legal encyclopedias in the law library of the Canal Zone District Court.
• undoware 4y ago
  My gender, actually
• icemanx 4y ago
  This is such a good opening for a great book
• novalis78 4y ago
  This might be giving away some secret of sorts but here we go: Sarasota is a unique place. Goodwill maintains dedicated bookstores - selling books at $2 each. Needless to say the stores are always well visited. There are always new amazing books streaming through. I once met a young bookseller lady from Houston who drove all the way to fill her truck with books from here. And, as the article hinted at, the area itself acts twofold: as a magnet and a filter. Being an artsy famous cultured beach town it attracts the often rich and successful retirees who, after having spent a life of collecting books but then because of age and many moves having to narrow down their collection end up with the best of the best books on any topic thus singled out and neatly brought to Sarasota. When these fine folks pass away they leave the treasures for the rest of us (unless their children have any idea what they are just about to give away). So, very often, you would bump into a new book, look at the artful ‘Ex libris’ sticker left on the first page and realize another collection of someone interesting just arrived. To honor those I usually try to pick up all their treasures and add them to my own collection which the kids have been instructed to keep together and hand down over the centuries…
• paulcapewell 4y ago
  367 comments here, and not a single one left at the original article's own blog! What a missed opportunity.
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Not my story but seems vaguely relevant. 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]
  • mrspeaker 4y ago
    I can't believe you posted that - just yesterday I was thinking about how dark that song was. The bit that really stood out was how "anti-Billy" it was: "He says his name is William, but I'm sure it's Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy". Like he was lying about his name/nickname. Then later - even when siding with him - says "They're nothing like Billy and me". He bloody told you his name was William! The more I thought about the song the more I thought that the lyrics made a really interesting poem. Then the next day I found out why!
• h9n 4y ago
  Last year I bought a copy of The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, first edition. Inside was a folded piece of paper printed in really coarse old dot-matrix that had (I (BE (NOT (RATHER (WOULD)))) (PROGRAMMING (LISP IN))) If only they'd stuck with it until evaluation order was introduced.
• stewx 4y ago
  The other day I found a decades-old Air Canada ticket in a thrift shop book.
• cslawson 4y ago
  I bought a used copy of A Discipline for Software Engineering by Watts S. Humphrey, and when I received it, I found that it had been signed by the author as a gift to his brother, Philip S. Humphrey. The inscription reads: "Phil - here's the latest opus - Watts"
• pliuchkin 4y ago
  I worked in a room next to a public library in the late 2000s and since the work was not that demmanding, I had plenty of time to read and explore the library. Someday I found a room full of old books that were not catalogued, it was a donation from the family of the town`s main doctor that had recently died. I spent a few weeks exploring his collection and when I went into a science fiction book, I dont remember exactly but I think it was Arthur C Clarke Profiles of the Future, I found a receipt dating beginning 60`s, it was a receipt from an airplane company. The doctor had been the mayor in that time and had paid the company just to have a plane flying low over the town. 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.
• dash2 4y ago
  That's not a strange thing found in a book! This is a strange thing found in a book: https://gutenberg.org/files/8486/8486-h/8486-h.htm#chap01 https://gutenberg.org/files/8486/8486-h/8486-h.htm#chap01 "It is a good thing to travel thus in company — sometimes."
• Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y ago
  When I was a college student I loved reading older books from the library because, for a time, whoever donated the book could write an inscription on the front matter. The inscriptions varied. Some were about the book. Some were about personal experiences at my college. Sometimes you’d even find doodles or poems.
• chasd00 4y ago
  Many years ago in my college physics book on some random page was handwritten “gentle reader, I wonder who you are”.
• bookofjoe 4y ago
  OT: HN homepage RIGHT NOW has several great posts/threads — as good as it's ever been.
• ianyanusko 4y ago
  An invitation to a secret society gathering that somebody seemingly should have picked up decades earlier. The book was a dead drop and apparently nobody had picked up that book in a long, long time.
• BizarroLand 4y ago
  I buy interesting looking books from Thrift stores, and the weirder the better. I found a copy of a book called, "You are becoming a Galactic Human": https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/you-are-becoming-a-galactic-human_virginia-essene_sheldon-nidle/270876/#edition=2288531&idiq=1216677 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 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.
• DEveritt 4y ago
• cronix 4y ago
  When I was in grade school in the 70's, I bought a used book with my allowance. It had a pristine $100 bill in it, presumably used for a bookmark. I think I paid $2 for it or something. Needless to say, I had never seen $100 before. I was filthy rich! I still remember the shock and joy.
• DEveritt 4y ago
• showerbeer 4y ago
  I do enjoy finding marginalia in used booked and have started doing it myself. I know some people think marking up books is sacrilege, but this is only mass-market paperbacks.
• showerscotch 4y ago
  I do enjoy finding marginalia in used booked and have started doing it myself. I know some people think marking up books is sacrilege, but this is only mass-market paperbacks.
• kizer 4y ago
  Put a smile on my face.
• cafard 4y ago
  In an introductory Russian book, a note in Russian that had been left by a cleaner in a hotel room, who was delighted to see that someone was studying Russian. 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.
• readingnews 4y ago
  A letter from the Pope. 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.
• pontifier 4y ago
  I was reading a book about time travel a few years ago that had randomly caught my attention. In the story they traveled to the exact date and time that I was reading the book. It was quite surreal.
• steve_taylor 4y ago
  When I was a kid learning how to code on a C64, I found a book on C64 assembly language programming. I forget the name, but it was aimed at kids. 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.
• hydrolox 4y ago
  Something the kindle can't emulate
• h2odragon 4y ago
  might want to make the link more specific: https://noctslackv2.wordpress.com/2022/08/02/whats-the-strangest-thing-you-ever-found-in-a-book/ https://noctslackv2.wordpress.com/2022/08/02/whats-the-stran...
  • ColinWright 4y ago
    Calling @dang ... (URLs can't be edited by non-admins like me)
    • Jtsummers 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
• MollyRealized 4y ago
  Hope this gets traction, it's a real nice story yet not glurge.
• misterprime 4y ago
  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.
• rhema 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      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%).
• tambourine_man 4y ago
  Wonderful story. And I think I have a speck of dust in my eye.
  • Phileosopher 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.
• RajT88 4y ago
  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 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 4y ago
    Hidden in the fridge somewhere
    • drewzero1 4y ago
      It was in the fridge, next to the cold ones!
  • r00fus 4y ago
    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?
• egypturnash 4y ago
  I was not expecting the thing to be "a new friend".
• spywaregorilla 4y ago
  > 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.
  • weberer 4y ago
    I feel stupid for just now realizing there's a link and OP is not just asking HN.
  • ColinWright 4y ago
    Your summary is kinda accurate, but I can't help but feel that you've missed the point completely.
    • spywaregorilla 4y ago
      It's not the point, it's just the part of it I enjoyed
  • motoboi 4y ago
    Dude found friend.
  • jacobolus 4y ago
    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.
• Heyso 4y ago
  Magic.
• ricardobayes 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    The notes I leave in books at bookstores all say "Who is John Galt?"
  • keithnz 4y ago
    I know in the library and some bookstores, I have found notes about finding "god" in books on evolution and atheisim.
• coldblues 4y ago
  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.
• myth_drannon 4y ago
  The moral of the story is talk to your siblings from time to time!
  • therouwboat 4y ago
    Some folks call number they found on old business card and some people don't even call their relatives. :)
• jonnycomputer 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
  • mindcrime 4y ago
    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)
• shagie 4y ago
  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 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 https://wapo.st/3SjGKNv
• smarri 4y ago
  Let's have a part 2, his life story! You teased us with that:)
• lostlogin 4y ago
  The following story about gunpowder is good too.
  • ask_b123 4y ago
    It was nice! Thanks for pointing it out.
  • keithnz 4y ago
    reminds me, in the mid 80s, of my friend and I who made a lot of gun powder when we were young, we pretty much got all the things we needed out of the encyclopedia. The potassium nitrate was easily available, in bulk, at the garden store, as well as Sulphur. We'd use lumps of charcoal on sandpaper and got a fantastically fine powder. We made various kinds of fireworks, then we started putting it in pipes and folding the ends over and we started getting "booms". We kept doing this until we made things that we started getting too scare to set off. We had quite a few close calls where pieces of shrapnel went wizzing by. We did this in my backyard, it was odd my parents were kind of ok with this (up until a point....) my dad who was a research physicist worked at a large scientific institute and must of talking to his friends at work about our adventures, and someone there gave him all these old chemicals, metals, and all kinds to take home. Things like magnesium which makes for great fireworks like things. Some iodine, which we turned into a super shock sensitive explosive (by mixing it with ammonia). Then there was a can of sodium pellets. Our experience with sodium had been what we had seen in class, you put a bit in water, and you get this pretty good fizz/fire reaction. Sort of was expecting this, these pellets were much bigger than anything we'd seen been put in water, so we just popped one in a bucket of water expecting a massive fizzing and buzzing around of the pellet..... but ..... nope, it did a bit of fizzing for half a second before it exploded sending burning sodium all over the back yard....luckily it didn't set anything on fire, but my parents weren't at impressed at this experiment and banned all further experiments. Now looking back on it, I just keep thinking... WHAT THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS THINKING?
• xwowsersx 4y ago
  What a delightful story.
• O__________O 4y ago
  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.
• TedShiller 4y ago
• ComputerCat 4y ago
  Such a heartwarming story, thanks for sharing. Sad though how people's beloved possessions can be discarded after death.
• gameshot911 4y ago
  How about an IP address[1]? [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/wf3e99/random_ip_address_printed_in_the_middle_of_a_word/ https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/wf3e99/r...
  • IshKebab 4y ago
    Not very strange. Someone just pasted at the wrong point and didn't notice.
    • CamperBob2 4y ago
      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 https://i.imgur.com/pevfen5.png
  • 0x0 4y ago
    How boring, an RFC 1918 address. :-/
• irrational 4y ago
  Localhost ip address has to be one of the strangest things ever found in a book. https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/wf3e99/random_ip_address_printed_in_the_middle_of_a_word/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/wf3e99/r...
  • chinathrow 4y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network
  • happyopossum 4y ago
    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).
• jccalhoun 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    I doubt a librarian would tell you who checks out what books.
    • ska 4y ago
      No but they might try and contact them for you (context dependent).
    • trebbble 4y ago
      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.
    • jccalhoun 4y ago
      no but they could have contacted the person and let them know
• daviddaviddavid 4y ago
  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.
  • ryanmercer 4y ago
    Just before covid started a friend of mine found a $100 bill in a purse at Goodwill, all of our friends went nuts on Facbeook reporting back on all the random (never money) stuff they were finding in pockets of purses/garments at Goodwill over the next couple of weeks.
  • jnovek 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
• rendleflag 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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.
• rendleflag 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• swayvil 4y ago
  I found an advertisement for cigarettes in the middle of Creatures of Light and Darkness.
  • trebbble 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • selimthegrim 4y ago
    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
• drooopy 4y ago
  The last chapter in Stephen King's IT /s
• camjohnson26 4y ago
  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.
• garyrob 4y ago
  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.
  • noisy_boy 4y ago
    Clear your mind to observe the small things. Alt: Pay attention to edge cases.
  • chasd00 4y ago
    It being inexplicable is the explanation.
  • _1tan 4y ago
    Care to explain your idea?
  • lake_vincent 4y ago
    The book is the explanation :)
  • somat 4y ago
    Porpoise http://www.thecodelesscode.com/case/66 http://www.thecodelesscode.com/case/66
    • teptoria 4y ago
      love this :) thanks for sharing
  • amelius 4y ago
    Perhaps just another way of saying "page intentionally left blank".
• balentio 4y ago
  Sixty bucks in a Percy Jackson Lightning Thief book. I mean, was it stolen? Was it signaling? What was it?
• SCUSKU 4y ago
  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.
• klondike_klive 4y ago
  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.
  • xpe 4y ago
    Hilarious! A passive reader he was not. :) I hope going through the books helps you remember good memories.
    • klondike_klive 4y ago
      Thanks!
• glfharris 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    "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 4y ago
      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.
• rfvisuals 4y ago
  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.
  • aimor 4y ago
    This happened to me once, but it was a beetle and it flew out of a sealed package of spinach from the grocery store. They doubled my refund which was nice.
• ortusdux 4y ago
  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.
  • lostlogin 4y ago
    This is like the Harry Potter book where Harry gets Voldemorts old potions notebook. It made him a star pupil too. Do you have a scar on your eyebrow?
    • cafeinux 4y ago
      That's the sixth book, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince". But if I recall correctly, the original owner of the book, the Half-Blood Prince, was none other than Snape, not Voldemort.
      • lostlogin 4y ago
        I stand corrected. Thanks.
      • mecha_ghidorah 4y ago
        God I thought that was such a weird book. It attempts to build loads of tension around the idea that an old textbook has gasp prewritten notes in it. I know that it tries to imply it might be Voldemort's textbook but even if it was... would that be a huge deal unless it had something useful/interesting specifically about Voldemort? For me at least that part of it fell spectacularly flat
• alexalx666 4y ago
  thanks for the links :D
• chad_strategic 4y ago
  Every once in a while you find a really good story on the internets. Thank you.
• trebbble 4y ago
  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.
  • coryfklein 4y ago
    OMG your 3) could be extremely valuable to the family. Check ancestry.com and see if you can find any of the family; descendents that appear in the tree – if any – are most likely to be the ones that would die to have the book and you may be able to look them up and contact them.
• JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  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.
• contingencies 4y ago
  Someone's antique pay packet in New Zealand pounds which had been taken out of circulation.
• smm11 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Now that you’ve got all of HN on tenterhooks what happened since?
    • smm11 4y ago
      I looked her up. She married someone in 1989, divorced, married another, divorced. Still a looker. Yes, we messaged a bit on FB. Oddly, we've both moved around the country a bit, and actually nearly bumped into each other. I interviewed at a place she was working in 2002. I live now, five states from there, but five miles from where she lived in the early 90s.
• bmitc 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    What was the book?
    • bmitc 4y ago
      The book is Probability and Related Topics in Physical Sciences by Mark Kac.
• aicswe 4y ago
  The login for a rival collegiate football team's bangbros account.
• JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• donatj 4y ago
  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 https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/LSItvlpfiCKAvBIb
  • justbaker 4y ago
    Sounds like an idea for a kids book, “The Haunted Calculator”
    • motoboi 4y ago
      Every calculation returns 666DEAD
• mod 4y ago
  In a much smaller coincidence, I read this during a traffic jam in Sarasota along the same route Charles probably drove.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• MichaelCollins 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_collecting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_collecting
• Alpi 4y ago
  Oh I found a golden card from Magic the Gathering
• GolfPopper 4y ago
  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.
• miki123211 4y ago
  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.
  • sitkack 4y ago
    That is a beautiful poetic extra dimension of the book that only could could receive.
  • gibolt 4y ago
    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?
    • miki123211 4y ago
      Modern versions of Chrome and Edge have features that try to guess what an image contains using AI techniques. Same with iOs and Mac OS. Modern iPhones even try to recognize controls on the screen, but my phone is too old for that to work. These solutions are still in their infancy, though, and therefore far from perfect. They might help us jump through a small accessibility hurdle once in a while, but without serious accessibility work from developers, we're doomed anyway.
      • aasasd 4y ago
• gilmore606 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    • harel 4y ago
      We used to place ads in a newspaper to find fellow Commodore/Amiga/Spectrum/Atari users to trade games with. It was not uncommon that my Saturdays involved my parents dropping me off at some random person's house (which might or might not have been my age) and picking me up a few hours later.
      • sundvor 4y ago
        This scene was incredibly strong in Norway back in the days, speaking as a then-teenager there.
        • harel 4y ago
          These days this would not fly... The risk of dropping a kid at some stranger's house all alone with a few floppies or tapes in this day and age could get a parent a stern visit from social services. But it was acceptable in the 80s...
          • em-bee 4y ago
• BlueGh0st 4y ago
  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.
• wwarner 4y ago
  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.
• karmelapple 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    In the 1930s there was no real reason to keep it secret. Tattoos: https://minarchist.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/social-security-card-number-tattoos-predated-auschwitz-german-national-socialism/ https://minarchist.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/social-security-...
  • hbn 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.
• mortenlarsen 4y ago
  In my "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" (the dragon book). A few National security Agency Post-Its with notes.
• blueflow 4y ago
  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?)
• tomcam 4y ago
  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.)
  • ryanmercer 4y ago
    >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. Not really related, and a bit of a "woo" book, but there's a book called Latitude 33: Key to the Kingdom by Walter Bosley that suggests SRI designed the original Disney Land in a certain way to harness some sort of "woo" energy on the 33rd parallel. There's a bit in it though (I'm 99% its in this book) that involves some peculiar man appearing out of time and place enjoying the park. I hadn't thought of that book in years but this triggered that. As a work of non-fiction it is dubious, but it's a fun read as a work of fiction. Now, wholly unrelated, but also a fun dubious as non-fiction but fun as fiction book: The Vertical Plane by Ken Webster which alleges that for 2 years in the 1980s messages from the 16th century and the future would appear on the author's BBC Micro computer with some interaction.
    • tomcam 4y ago
      If you think I, a mature, science-oriented man of substance, have any interest these "woo" books, you are 100% correct. Can't wait to read "Latitude 33". Long ago I deep-dove into the Ken Webster but found it ultimately unsatisfying because it was unfalsifiable. But what a ride!
• type0 4y ago
  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.
• computator 4y ago
  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 https://www.mscroggs.co.uk/blog/tags/books (halfway down has a photo of the Scientific American issue)
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    Watching the film The Last Emperor I noted the scene in which a TIME photographer was present for the Emperor's coronation (as a Japanese puppet). The thought occurred that this quite probably was an actual occurrence, and that there should be an article corresponding to the story. My uni library had a collection of back issues, and sure enough, I found the article and read it ... an interesting corroboration, counterpoint, and expansion to what was shown in the film (remarkably true to life as best as I could tell).
• Group_B 4y ago
  A hot topic receipt and a boarding pass, together.
• pugworthy 4y ago
  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.
  • fuzzfactor 4y ago
    This was a text too, I was a math student but it was not a class I had, this was a 19th century book. The owner had embellished the inner covers and a few blank pages there. In the most beautiful handwriting from a bold ink pen were a number of short passages, and one I will never forget: Remember me when death shall close my eyelids in the last repose And evening breezes gently wave the grass above your schoolmate's grave.
  • imadethis 4y ago
    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 https://twitter.com/TheMERL/status/1048541160271237120
• waltwalther 4y ago
  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.
• zanethomas 4y ago
  Bookworms. Really. Had a very old dictionary with bookworms!
• parenthesis 4y ago
  I've commented on this before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2670735 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.
• zw123456 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    I think that's perfectly in line with what they meant. I certainly don't have a story like that.
• zahma 4y ago
  How to synthesize methamphetamine. It was in my organic chemistry textbook.
  • gcheong 4y ago
    Gotta pay for those textbooks somehow!
• dmead 4y ago
  I found a hand written manuscript about lambda calculus that was bound in something that looked like it was from the 50s.
• mutation 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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!
• busterarm 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Lio 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    https://maps.nls.uk/ https://maps.nls.uk/
• willis936 4y ago
  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.
• TigeriusKirk 4y ago
  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.
• crabbygrabby 4y ago
  Love this story. Probably money I hid when I was a kid
• yuan43 4y ago
  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-books-collection https://www.npr.org/2022/08/02/1114851706/library-notes-book...
• Cyder 4y ago
  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.
• anony23 4y ago
  I found a plane ticket stub from decades ago.
• dzhiurgis 4y ago
  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).
• pedrosbmartins 4y ago
  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.
• rurp 4y ago
  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.
• mongol 4y ago
  I once found, in a second hand birding book (Collins Guide / Fågelguiden), 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)
• al_be_back 4y ago
  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!
• sammalloy 4y ago
  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".
  • fractallyte 4y ago
    Offtopic: your account reminded me of a funny event from a few years back. I'd arranged with a friend to watch a movie, 28 Weeks Later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later). We picked a cinema in London's Canary Wharf area, not realizing that the movie was actually set there! Spoiler: in the movie, Canary Wharf is utterly destroyed by firebombing. When we emerged from the movie, we walked around in a daze, through areas that we'd seen obliterated just a short while earlier.
    • sammalloy 4y ago
      Thanks for this. Because of your comment, I’m going to rewatch the film series. It’s been a while.
• grapescheesee 4y ago
  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“
  • romanhn 4y ago
    One Rhonda Sollberger is fairly easily found on Facebook via Google (different last name currently). The others are trickier.
    • Loughla 4y ago
      Stop that, please. Some things are genuinely better left as is. Is it just me, or is anyone else upset that mystery just can't exist anymore. Everything has to have a connection. It's just depressing.
      • fknorangesite 4y ago
• ThorInAVillage 4y ago
  We used to visit a village in Pakistan because my dad's family lived there. I hated going there because it was a village and really boring with nothing to do there. One day (as a ten year old) I decided to go snooping at my uncle's house because I was extremely bored. While going through some pantry closets I found a Thor comic book! In a village in Pakistan! We're talking about the late 1970s. That was my first introduction to comic books!
• bondolo 4y ago
  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.
  • xpe 4y ago
    > I did not keep either the condom or the book. Nobody would have suspected the former until you denied doing it. Thanks for sharing the story. P.S. Time to throw that old condom away. Decluttering is good for the soul.
• topkai22 4y ago
  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.
• hcrisp 4y ago
  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.
• ggm 4y ago
  A reminder slip to attend an artificial limb clinic
• _pazta 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    So... did you keep it?
• Cook4986 4y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/5JDxyVpmbJA
• danielodievich 4y ago
  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.
  • Engineering-MD 4y ago
    Harry Potter and the half blood prince?
  • coryfklein 4y ago
    Reading too much Harry Potter as of late I see.
• LeonTheremin 4y ago
  Found a space between two pages to hide money - so good a place to hide money I myself never found these bills again.
• zatkin 4y ago
  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 https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb42-3/tb132beeton-spivak.pdf
  • unnouinceput 4y ago
    Luckily now they are (all 5) free online: https://vdoc.pub/download/a-comprehensive-introduction-to-differential-geometry-2o387jgoekog https://vdoc.pub/download/a-comprehensive-introduction-to-di...
• forrestbrazeal 4y ago
  A few years ago, at Goodwill, I found a lovely 1930s copy of Eve Curie's biography of her mother Marie Curie. The book had been well-preserved in a homemade mylar jacket. In the flyleaf were two inscriptions: one a woman's name with "Dr", dated in the 1970s; the other dated in the early 2000s with another woman's name, also a doctor. When I flipped through the pages, a "Congrats grad" card fell out. Dr. A was Dr B's mother and had given her this book from her own library upon Dr B's graduation from med school.
• jonathankoren 4y ago
  My parents have some book from early 1900s that was a great or great-great uncle's. It has a prescription for a treatment for a venereal disease.
• yawnxyz 4y ago
  In high school I used to work at a library in Columbia, MD, just checking in/out books, shelving them, etc. Columbia happens to be very close to the NSA headquarters, and more than once I've found people use classified documents (once even an SSH login / password for some server). ...obviously I never tried to SSH into that box.
• GormHouj 4y ago
  A friend of mine once had the idea to create a zine where the contents were made up of things that we'd find in between the pages of books at Goodwill. 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.
  • plankers 4y ago
    damn wish that got published, i know some people who would love it.
• jamesfinlayson 4y ago
  A french newspaper clipping from 1907 - the book documented some museum's collection and the newspaper article was very tangentially related, but the museum was in the UK and didn't have anything french in it.
• broth 4y ago
  What was truly won at that auction was a priceless friendship and the ability for someone to pass down some of their prized books to their grandchildren. Amazing.
• jim_lawless 4y ago
  I bought an old book at a used book store and I found the receipt for the original book purchase inside. The receipt had the buyer's name and credit card number clearly printed.
• Eupraxias 4y ago
  I once picked up a very old Loeb edition of Aeschylus, and there was a four-leaf clover stuck between almost every page.
• tmoertel 4y ago
  About 15 years ago, I purchased a hardcover copy of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, published in 1946. Inside the cover was the following inscription: Ambassador Douglas (in pencil) Geyelin, 4511 Cath. Ave. N.W. (in pen) Intrigued, I started researching the names and dates. Here's what I pieced together. 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.
• SLWW 4y ago
  I think the strangest thing I've ever found in a book had to be in the University's Library (still upset that i gave away my second edition Mein Kampf, that's why you don't give an alcoholic an interesting book, they'll pawn it off in a second to make ends meet) 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.
• jbuzbee 4y ago
  When Aldrich Ames, the notorious CIA KGB double-agent was sent to prison, his personal library ended up in a used bookstore in the DC area and I picked up a few volumes that had his name stamped on the inside.
• spiffytech 4y ago
  Since everyone's talking about textbooks: I thought I'd save money buying the "international edition", since it seemed to have all the same information. I had homework assignments that required analyzing color-coded diagrams in the book. Except the international edition was printed in black and white!
• sizzzzlerz 4y ago
  At a garage sale, I bought a bagful of books, sight unseen, for a dollar. When I got it home and starting looking at what was there, I found a first edition of Edward Abbey's The Monkeywrench Gang. Inside the book was an envelope addressed to the original purchaser, I suppose. Inside that was a letter from Abbey, written in response to a letter the purchaser had sent him, thanking him for his kind words. I had the handwriting in the letter along with its signature authenticated. I now have it framed. Pretty cool!
  • mauvehaus 4y ago
    As an Abbey fan, I'm turning green with envy here. I'm still hoping to someday read Jonathan Troy without going to the considerable expense of buying it, not least because Abbey himself thought it was crap. Maybe I should buy more random bags of goodwill books...
• dghughes 4y ago
  Recently $23 dollars in $1 bills. Which is strange for Canada in 2022 since dollar bills were discontinued in 1989.
• dredmorbius 4y ago
  My favourite graffito of all time was a marginalia note in a book of Jane Jacobs, from my uni library, following some comment or another she'd made regarding architecture and/or urban planning: "God bless you, Jane!" I couldn't have agreed more, and found the defacement entirely justified.
• grepLeigh 4y ago
  A morgue toe tag used as a bookmark.
• shannifin 4y ago
  I found a book full of four-leaf clovers, five-leaf, six-leaf, even a few seven-leafs. Hundreds of them, a really impressive collection.
• ironmagma 4y ago
  I went to the Orlando Public Library once, science section. Saw a book titled, "Combustion." I open the pages to take a look which unveils pieces of weed pressed between the pages. I wonder just how long that had been sitting there.
• tootie 4y ago
  An entire squished cockroach. I want to say it was a Ray Bradbury but can't recall the title.
• PBnFlash 4y ago
  I found an internal memo from the supreme court of Maryland in a book I ordered off of Amazon.
• iancmceachern 4y ago
  I bought my brother a book as a gift. A book I love called "powers of 10" which is a series of pictures each taken from an order of magnitude greater distance. It starts with atoms and goes all the way up to the milky way. It's such a good way to understand the relative size of things in our universe. 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
  • thangalin 4y ago
    > It starts with atoms and goes all the way up to the milky way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEHCCsFFIuY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEHCCsFFIuY
    • inyorgroove 4y ago
      I assumed you linked "powers of ten"[1] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
• jurassic 4y ago
  I found a few 1860s wedding certificates and a handwritten IOU from the same era in one of my grandfather’s reference books on stamp collecting.