It said something along the lines of:
(Jenny? - I can't remember if that was the name or not) To my most dear pupil, I will never forget you.
With all my love from (I can't remember that name either)
It was most mysterious
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It said something along the lines of:
(Jenny? - I can't remember if that was the name or not) To my most dear pupil, I will never forget you.
With all my love from (I can't remember that name either)
It was most mysterious
I've bought hundreds of second-hand books, and the only unusual thing I found in any of them was a "balloon letter." The book was - is - a biography of Henry Labouchere, who was in Paris when it was besieged by the Germans in 1870. The letter was sent to his mother and left Paris by air balloon to get over the German lines.
I found some train tickets in a Vonnegut book i was reading dated April 16th 1954, and the day i found it was April 16th 2008, 54 years later to the day, they seems really crisp and new and i use them for a bookmark sometimes. I really like the notes inside covers that you get sometimes. I'm a really big fan of the Found Magazine book, it's really funny and touching.
love love second-hand books. Love to wonder who held them, especially if they're very old. Love to wonder what that person was like, what she thought of the book...
Usually I find dollar bills. Once I found $33 in a birthday card for a man who turned 33 in a library book.
This is how I feel whenever I read an inscription. I especially wonder about the person when I see a very old inscription. For some reason those interest me the most. I like to try to imagine what that person may have looked like, too. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by andave_ya
I have only found little things in books that were used as bookmarks. Nothing exciting. This has happened so rarely to me. But I really do enjoy reading the inscriptions whenever one appears.
Yeah! I browse the Booksale shop in the mall at least once a week, searching for books written in either French or Spanish. hose are at the top of my priority list but I do buy some hard-to find books (boks that I can't find in a normal bookstore).Quote:
Originally Posted by princesspoppi
So far, the weirdest thing I've found is a report card of a female student. And she's got straight A's!
I think price is not what is being discussed here --- obviously used books are cheaper than new ones --- I think what is being referred to is the kind of things you can find in used books.Quote:
Originally Posted by wilbur lim
I once found a note a previous owner had written on the front page --- the guy had been in Italy in WWII and had copied down the poem that is engraved on Dante's headstone... very moving.
Stop press! I just found a card photograph of Joseph Ratzinger inside Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go".
How do you know it wasn't some unwashed person who was picking his nose as he was turning the pages? :DQuote:
Originally Posted by andave_ya
I remember one time, when I was younger, I would always wonder about this book I had that had the name and address of a guy written in it. Many years later, I saw my neighbours ute with his name and business on it, and we'd been friends with them for quite a few years, and thats when it clicked that the boy who used to own the book and the man who lived nextdoor were actually one and the same! :p
But most recently, a week or two ago, I got a lot of second hand books, and in this set of encyclopedia type thing, was a lot of photos and postcards, which were very interesting.
Photographs, the old author's annotations (as long as it's not a high-school copy of the Lord of the Flies with central themes underlined, highlighted, etc.).
I have to say, the most interesting thing I have ever found in a second hand book is a very long letter from an unidentified woman to her best friend/female lover?. It rambles from tangent to tangent and finishes off with, "I'm sorry this is in pencil, but I am not allowed sharp objects right now." It makes me wonder and is such an intrusion into other people's private lives...
(EW. And occasionally, I find people's food-y fingerprints on the pages XP. Which I can't deny doing myself, but other people's bolognese sauce on p.54 of Mother Night doesn't do it for me.)