A really cool article about objects found pressed into the pages of second-hand books. Some are valuable, others just interesting … I have found some very cool things in the pages of old books. A tiny hand-sewn lace handkerchief. A greeting card. Newspaper clippings, yellowed with age. Very cool.
Excerpt from article:
“A Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card. It was the original 1952 Topps #311 baseball card and not a reprint. It is in good condition and I still have it. There were three other cards as well – Gus Zernial (Philadelphia Athletics), Jim Busby (Washington Senators) and Leo Durocher (Manager of the New York Giants). These cards are also originals and not reprints, and are from the Baseball Collector Series. I believe these are also 1952 vintage and are in very good condition.”
Cool!!
I’ve found notes, shopping lists, bookmarks, all generally unremarkable to my memory, in library books. But one thing I did find that sticks with me to this day was a warning penciled in on the title page of a book.
I was 12 or so and was exhausting the Sci-Fi shelves at my library. I decided to undertake Elronâs Mission Earth 10-book series. In book 6 or 7 someone wrote on that page something to the effect: âThis book is the biggest pile of bilious nonsense.â
Ah, hindsight.
Ha!!!
I think the coolest thing I ever found in a book was a flyer in my college library for a Shakespeare festival up in Oregon dated 1971. I can’t remember what the book was called, but I never forgot that old thing.
I found one of my grandfathers Weyerhauser Pay Stubs in a book of Darius Kinsey photography marking a page with him in the forests of Western Washington next to a tree (more appropriately “log”) that he had just cut down. It was over sixteen feet in diameter. The stub was ripped in half but still showed that he was earning $2.40 a day and had all the deductions of the company store (food, housing, snuff, etc.). It totally brought to life the ol’ saying “owe your sole to the company store”
M
I’ve found lots of newspaper clippings. Sometimes they’re recipes. Sometimes they’re bits out of long-gone “style” pages. Once in a while I’ll run across an announcement of a debutante from 1948 or something and I figure the book must have belonged to someone in her family.
I’ve also found pressed flowers, and once, a four-leafed clover.
I’m always tempted when I de-book to slip some kind of mysterious token between two of the pages for some future reader to find…like a slip of paper with the word “Diaphanous” written on it, or a take-out menu saved from one of my trips somewhere, or one of my old grade-school photographs.
I got a used book on historical angels that had dozens of four leaf clovers inside. That book had really good mojo!
I worked for a while at a auction company that specialized in books (I was their go-to girl for early 20th c. children’s serials), and while I cannot remember ever finding anything great or valuable, we found a lot of photographs. All of the employees eventually became somewhat inured to tossing books that had no value, but we kept any photos that fell out: old glass negative prints, kodachrome glossies, those fuzzy off-color 1970s polaroids. We stuck them all over the cinderblock walls of our warehouse/office. We gave them names. We grouped them into families. One of the stuffed shirts from accounting tried to have them removed (a fire hazard or something?), but we each claimed a portion and insisted that they were relatives and thus protected by the employee handbook clause permitting personal and family photos.