Skip to main content

Things found in books

Besides marking and underlining text and writing and making doodles in the margins of books, people stick all sorts of things into them as bookmarks or for safekeeping and then forget about them. As a lifelong library patron and buyer of used books I have had the opportunity to study this phenomenon up close. The most common item I find, perhaps not surprisingly, is sales and library receipts, followed by libray bookmarks, advertising bookmarks from bookshops and publishers and sticky notes (especially inside academic books). But I have also found postcards, both blank and written, art bookmarks, boarding passes, money, stamps, dried flowers, assorted scraps of paper (with and without writing) and photographs. Also included is one fast-food menu and a beer label that had been carefully peeled off the bottle and stuck inside the cover of a book.
The saddest find was a child's drawing. It made me wonder if a parent had not cared what happened to the picture, or whether was it so precious to them that they used it as a bookmark so they could look at it every time they opened the book. The most disgusting find (apart from various mystery stains and squashed bugs) was a used hormone patch.

I myself have stuck things inside books and then forgotten about them. The only really important thing I have lost in a book was my I.D. card. I was about 12 when I absentmindedly stuck it into a Desmond Bagely thriller to mark my place. I then stopped reading the book for some reason and put it back on the shelf where it remained unread for several years. I couldn't for the life of me remember what I had done with the I.D. card. Fortunately I didn't need it much. By the time the old one was rediscovered I had both a driver's licence and a passport and didn't need it any more. But this did teach me never to use anything as a bookmark that I didn't want to lose.

A recent discovery I made was inside a dictionary I haven't used much since I left middle-school. It was a lock of my own hair that I suddenly remembered putting in there shortly after I got the book, that showed unmistakably that while I am now a brunette, in my childhood and into my teens my hair was dark blonde. I think I will remove it, as I now know that the oils in hair are not kind to paper, but I need to find a place to keep it where it will not be lost, perhaps a memory box.

I have usually stuck the more personal items I find, like photos of people and written postcards, back in the book I found them in, but I have kept the unwritten postcards, bookmarks, stamps and money (mind you, if it was a large denomination note in a library book, I would check at the library if anyone had reported it missing, but I have never found high value money). Now, however, I think maybe I will follow the lead of the editors of Found Magazine and keep all of them. They may make an interesting art project some day.

Comments

Maxine Clarke said…
That's a lovely post. The part about the child's drawing was poignant.
I often buy used library books but I don't think I have found anything other than scribblings (eg corrected typos) and turned down corners (a pet hate of mine).

However, as I am an avid reader I am always being given bookmarks, but where do they all go? After pens, they are the one thing that seem to disassociated into thin air after a few days of me owning them.

It was your posting about bookmarks that made me find your blog in the first place, I now recall!
Bibliophile said…
The child's drawing was special. I left it in the book, and now I can't remember what book it was, so I may never find it again.

You seem to have the same problem as my mother: her bookmarks also keep disappearing. I think it's like socks and clothes-dryers. I'm sure you have heard the theory that there are wormholes inside dryers that only eat one half of any given pair of socks? Well, I think the same thing happens with booksmarks: you put them in books and sometimes the books eat them.
user24 said…
heh, I find stuff like this fascinating - I used to find so many things when I was at university that I actually created a whole website dedicated to things found in books - I'd love you to share the things you've found!
Bibliophile said…
User24, you are welcome to. You can either copy the post or link back to it. Just remember to give me credit.

I may be posting some more found things before long.

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme