Thursday, January 15, 2009

Librarian, there's some bacon in my book









We may never fully understand what prompts people to leave unusual objects inside books. I speak of the slice of fried bacon that the novelist Reynolds Price once found nestled within the pages of a volume in the Duke University library. I speak of the letter that ran: “Do not write to me as Gail Edwards. They know me as Andrea Smith here,” which the playwright Mark O’Donnell found some years ago in a used paperback. I speak of any of those bizarre objects — scissors, a used Q-tip, a bullet, a baby’s tooth, drugs, pornography and 40 $1,000 bills — that have been discovered by the employees of secondhand bookstores, according to The Wall Street Journal and AbeBooks.com. Mystery surrounds these deposits like darkness.


- Henry Alford, NYT

Read more here.

2 comments:

Morgan Mandel said...

That's funny. I never thought of what kind of different items could appear tucked in books. I've heard of money being used for bookmarks, but that's about all.

Morgan Mandel
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Annay Dawson said...

I have found photos left in books and truthfully, I have to admit that I love it. It gives me a chance to people watch without really pestering someone.