[HN Gopher] Found in a Library Book
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Found in a Library Book
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 62 points
Date : 2023-09-02 18:56 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oaklandlibrary.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (oaklandlibrary.org)
| tokai wrote:
| We once wound a geocache in a hollowed out book. First it caused
| a lot of anger from some of my colleagues until it was confirmed
| that it wasn't one of our books, but one brought in from the
| outside. In the end it was tagged, registered, and put back on
| the shelf were it was found.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I love this.
|
| As someone who buys a lot of books I've often wondered about the
| previous owners. Sometimes you get a glimpse of them when you
| find a book with their names written on it.
|
| Recently I've been gathering a collection of first edition/first
| print Goosebumps books and unsurprisingly they're a lot more
| likely to have markings on them than your average book (being
| targeted at 4th grade students).
|
| One night I searched the internet for a few of the full names I
| found in the books just to see where the owners were today.
|
| One of the first I turned up was an obituary for a woman that had
| died two years ago. It said she had a lifelong love of reading.
| bombcar wrote:
| This could itself be the beginning of a Goosebumps story.
| javajosh wrote:
| I find it interesting that 2 of 3 comments mention the word
| "love" because I was going to post "I love this so much!".
| There's something magical about such found objects, and is a big
| reason I still have a huge, unweildy physical library of books.
| They remember things that digital copies don't. Plus I have this
| weird thing where I can remember which side of a book something
| was on, which cuts the search time in half! I daresay that we'll
| see this digital everything always on screen era as a fad, like
| the era where everyone smoked.
| terminous wrote:
| I would feel so violated if I accidentally left very personal
| handwritten notes in a library book that I returned, then have
| the library scan it and very publicly turn it into social media
| fodder. These notes are not for any of us to read.
| gameman144 wrote:
| I had the same reaction. Having one person read some personal
| info I'd accidentally forgotten would be one thing, but
| blasting it for the world to see just seems sort of
| disrespectful.
|
| Granted, I'm also not a big personal social media guy in
| general, so maybe that's just my bias peeking through.
| yborg wrote:
| Respect your feelings, but I also consider this as motivation
| to make sure not to leave items in library books. I hold them
| up and page side down and fan the pages to make sure I didn't
| leave a bookmark in there.
|
| Of course, the physical book will soon be a thing of the past
| at the public library (-_-) so I suppose these considerations
| will soon be moot.
| schoen wrote:
| My father owns a used bookstore and he's always finding objects
| in books left there by previous owners.
|
| One time he found a folded handwritten page in Latin which he
| sent me because I know Latin. It said
|
| registrum baptizatorum succursalis ecclesia de Borlo anni 1807 /
| registrum mortuorum de Borlo
|
| It was a handwritten record, kept in Latin by a priest, of all
| baptisms and deaths in Borlo (now Gingelom, Limburg, Belgium) in
| the year 1807. (There are a few issues with the Latin.)
|
| I framed it and put it up on the wall as a decoration, but later
| I realized that it could have value for people's present-day
| genealogical research, so I mailed it back to the public library
| in the town. The librarian said it would be kept in the
| provincial archive.
| westcort wrote:
| I once created a website to catalog all of the out of copyright
| books in the Library of Congress and randomized selections so one
| could replicate the serendipity of browsing (locserendipity.com).
| In the process of doing this, Jessamyn West identified stickers
| or stamps on some of the books
| (https://twitter.com/jessamyn/status/1114333025716854784). Some
| of the staff at the LOC knew what they were---stamps indicating
| which books to take offsite in the the unlikely event the Nazis
| invaded the United States.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Nice, tax dollars at work building sites that were never asked
| for.
| rfrey wrote:
| There has never been a tax expenditure, in the history of
| political mankind, that everyone agreed was "asked for".
| ta988 wrote:
| I've always loved looking at books and bags in thrift stores for
| that kind of stuff.
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(page generated 2023-09-02 23:00 UTC)