“Have you ever wondered what happens to the things you leave behind?”

July 21, 2022 5:25 AM

Found in a Library Book is an online collection of scanned items that people have left in library books in Oakland, California, including art, notes, lists and stuff by kids. [via Annie Rauwerda]
posted by Kattullus (28 comments total)

aw, the notes from kids are so much and so real.

Cheyenne is mean
NO SHE'S NOT SERENA

... Do you hate me
Not really

Once I found an MIT punch card from the 60s or 70s in a Boston-area library book. It had a very cool stylized college logo, and I used it as a bookmark until I spilled something on it and it was folded, spindled, and mutilated when it dried. I suppose people must have kept punch cards the way they have IDs or account passwords today.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:48 AM on July 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

I left a dollar bill in a library book once because I was amused to think of the reaction of whoever opened the book next. I suspect the person who opened the book next was the librarian who I handed it to at the reception desk... I was secretly hoping it would make it to the shelf before someone found it but I suppose I am not surprised.
posted by Whale Oil at 6:11 AM on July 21, 2022

My library! I scanned for crap I left in my books but haven't come across any yet.

I feel like there was a stuff left in library books post years ago here.. I remember a section on surprising non- paper items maybe? And commenting how I once found a whole Cadbury Cream Egg in a book at the Sacramento State University library.
posted by latkes at 6:18 AM on July 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

I worked at a library branch that would collect found bookmarks until we had a bunch and then put them at the circulation desk labeled "Free Bookmarks!"
posted by zzazazz at 6:23 AM on July 21, 2022 [8 favorites]

I read all 20 volumes of the Aubrey-Maturin series. Got each of them from the same branch library. Someone else was doing it at the same time, because sometimes I'd have to wait 1-3 days for a particular volume to show up when the branch had a single copy. We read at similar speeds.

Long story short, I had extra time on my hands, and for the last few volumes I'm pretty sure I got ahead of this other reader. So in the final volume I left a note for them, about how much I enjoyed the series, including particulars, and hoped they also had a great time.

I don't know if they ever saw it. I hope they did. It was the closest I've ever come to communion over a book.
posted by nushustu at 7:38 AM on July 21, 2022 [19 favorites]

Back in the age of paper tickets, I'd make a point of slipping the ticket stub from any band I went to see into one of that band's CDs on my shelf back home. I like to think of someone buying that CD from a junk shop years after my death and finding the extra little treasure tucked inside.
posted by Paul Slade at 7:40 AM on July 21, 2022 [8 favorites]

That is not a Frown! That is Beaker!
Who may, admittedly, be frowning. But mostly it's just his face.
posted by Glinn at 7:54 AM on July 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

As a kid I learnt that you could make two-dimensional leaves and flowers by pressing them in a book. Library books were no good for this, you need a stack of old phone books*. I didn't carry phone books around though, so they'd go into whatever book I had in my bag until I got home.

I found ones years later on the bookshelf that I don't even remember collecting. See a cool leaf? Pop it in a book, forget about it. Some of them must have ended up in the library for sure.

*ask your parents what phone books are
posted by adept256 at 7:59 AM on July 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

So far my favorite thing about this is how well catalogued it is.
posted by tangosnail at 8:12 AM on July 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

My most memorable "found" object experience involved going back to the U of Chicago library about a dozen years ago to look at a book, picking it up, and finding my own dissertation place markers in there, happily undisturbed since around 1996.
posted by thomas j wise at 8:40 AM on July 21, 2022 [20 favorites]

There's a used bookstore here in Brooklyn that at one point had a bulletin board devoted to "Weird Shit We Found In Used Books." I am drawing a blank on everything I saw there except for one thing - an artfully-posed photo of someone's naked backside, covered in what looked like baby powder.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:05 AM on July 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

I still had an outstanding library book when I received word over Christmas break that I had failed out of my PhD program. It was an obscure book about engineering and differential equations for soil erosion that was written sometime in the 1950s and hadn't been checked out by anyone else for years. One of the ways I coped with this watershed moment in my life was to idly ponder returning the book with a note tucked inside that would recognize it as the last library book I ever borrowed in my academic career and carry a wishful message for anyone who found it. In the end I returned the book without including any such academic epitaphs, but now I kind of wish I had.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:35 AM on July 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

I found a morning-after note in a used book recently:

[hername] It was so very nice, being next to you all night [heart] [hisname]
& dinner was delicious too
See you soon.

It was on his business card. His FBI business card.
posted by leaper at 9:54 AM on July 21, 2022 [14 favorites]

Worked in libraries for a good 15+ years. Found a condom and a tampon used as bookmarks. (Neither of them had been used).
posted by marxchivist at 9:55 AM on July 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

I have found so many interesting things in books from my time working in libraries and sorting books for a charity that I've made art over the years from the found objects. My favorite was a book with six or seven snowflakes tucked in it.
posted by blueberry monster at 9:58 AM on July 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

I've seen some interesting things left in books, mostly notes. Some were things obviously meant for the eyes of others only, and I wouldn't repeat them even if I fully remembered them. Some were their very personal conspiracy theories. One of my favorites was one that was a sort of wish list, not for Santa or posting on Amazon, but just what they aspired to; I don't remember the exact details, except that the car that they mentioned wasn't some big-deal luxury car, they just knew the make, model, and color.

At the end was this: mad pimping all over the world. Here's hoping that you got to see at least a bit of it.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:53 AM on July 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

I've collected bookmarks for years*. Libraries and used bookstores are good places to find older bookmarks. Some libraries are scrupulous about removing things left in books and others not so much.

One of my favorite non-bookmark finds was at the Dawn Treader bookstore in Ann Arbor. In an 1889 "Twenty-third New and Enlarged Edition" of:

"Dr. Chase's Recipes;

or,

Information for Everybody:

An Invaluable Collection of about Eight Hundred

PRACTICAL RECIPES

for Merchants, Grocers, Saloon-Keepers, Physicians, Druggists, Tanners, Shoemakers, Harness Makers, Painters, Jewelers, Blacksmiths, Tinners, Gunsmiths, Farriers, Barbers, Bakers, Dyers, Renovators, Farmers, and Families Generally.

with

A Rational Treatment of Pleurisy, Inflammation of the Lungs, and other Inflammatory Diseases, and also for General Female Debility and Irregularities."

By A. W. Chase, M. D.

was the most beautiful and delicate lock of flaxen hair, presumably from a child's first haircut. I wouldn't normally be interested in such a book but I had to get it to ensure that the book and hair would stay together.

*Someday they will be the subject of a MeFi Projects posting.
posted by plastic_animals at 11:32 AM on July 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

Someone left us a butter knife as a bookmark once. That was my favorite.
posted by blnkfrnk at 11:56 AM on July 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

When I was leaving the town where I went to college, I sold a bunch of books to a bookstore near campus. But I had forgotten that I had pressed a lot of marijuana leaves in a bunch of the books. So the person at the counter would be flipping through a book to look for damage and a bunch of pot leaves would fly out. Then the same thing would happen a few books later, over and over again.
posted by snofoam at 11:58 AM on July 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

A slice of processed cheese in the wrapper. Seriously.

What weirdo leaves a slice of cheese in a book?

And who would eat processed cheese anyway?
posted by BlueHorse at 12:08 PM on July 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I lend cooking books from my library, and while making the recipes, frequently spills food in them. Now and again I lend the same books, and there they are, small spots from a dinner I made years ago.
posted by beesbees at 12:24 PM on July 21, 2022

I did this for years with stuff I found in records people sold to me (I own a record shop) and considered having an online archive, but there are just too many nude selfies (mostly Polaroids) so it didn't really seem appropriate.

I once read of someone who bought an album at a garage sale and found Marvin Gaye's passport inside. Neat.
posted by dobbs at 1:02 PM on July 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

Items left in books are the first thing I look for when I flip through them at flea markets and yard sales. (Most of the ones in my favorite used book store are too clean). I have a check from the early 1900s; an Easter card from the Victorian era; the usual pressed leaves and such. I try to leave the item in the book (I collect very old books), but on rare occasions when I've sold them I admit I've kept what I found inside.
posted by annieb at 1:56 PM on July 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

We used to find lots of odd stuff in the used bookstore where I used to work. We kept it in a box and always talked about dedicating a wall to it but that never happened. Some things did make their way into Found magazine though and that was cool. We gave away the found bookmarks - kept a holder by the register for people to rummage through. I used to put my darkroom test strips in there too from when I was doing a lot of film photography.

The saddest found things were the old photographs; it just seemed like such a shame that they were lost and never found again. The grossest things were the floss and toss flossers - UGH. Please. Why? The money was nice; we kept it in a kitty for staff coffee or going out for drinks. The coolest were probably the pressed leaves and flowers. And the letters and notes and shopping lists were the most interesting.
posted by mygothlaundry at 2:42 PM on July 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

My current library book contained a post-it note outlining talking points for informing the kids of their parents’ impending divorce. Felt like it told as much of a story as the book.
posted by Comet Bug at 2:58 PM on July 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

I once was browsing through a second hand bookshop and spotted "I, Fatty" by Jerry Stahl. I thought: "It's odd that they have that such a specific book for sale". I flipped the pages and found an airplane ticket stub from a defunct airline with my name on it. Turns out It was the same book I had sold 10 years before to another second hand bookshop miles away.
posted by Omon Ra at 5:04 PM on July 21, 2022 [13 favorites]

When I was in grad school, I went to visit my parents in Oregon, and while there made a special trip to Powell's in Portland. I found a book with the distinctive name of one of my professors written inside the cover. I bought it and anonymously left it in his campus mailbox. At a departmental gathering, he asked if anyone knew who left it, because it was his book from when he was a kid, and he couldn't imagine how it made its way into his mailbox. I never came clean.
posted by OrangeDisk at 2:43 PM on July 22, 2022 [11 favorites]

OrangeDisk: You've reminded me of this story.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:08 AM on July 23, 2022 [2 favorites]