In today’s Wall Street Journal there’s an article about the sorts of things people leave in the books they sell to used book stores.
Bookstore owners talk about photos, cards, letters, money, and other material that people forgot to remove, only to be found by shop clerks and occasionally customers. Here’s a brief overview:
– One guy’s rap sheet wound up in a bookstore in New York: he was arrested at an anti-Apartheid sit-in at Cornell University in 1985, and his complete arrest record, including a complete set of fingerprints, sneaked out.
– In a book about the New Orleans Museum of Art, there was “a spent bullet.”
– A doctor’s prescription pad with these words written on it: “Wednesday — mambo, lindy, spins. Thursday — rumba or tango. At work — angry. Really got angry. How to use?”
– One bookstore owner described a collection of photos he found “which I can’t bring in” of “men in negligees.”
– Another owner talked how he opened a book titled “The Bill of Rights” to discover it was hollowed out. He later learned that Abbie Hoffman had hidden a tape recorder inside during the Chicago Seven trial.
One of the clerks summed up the findings by saying, “It’s as if the book picked up a new story. I’m not sure I want to know the whole truth. The suppositions are so interesting.”
So before you donate or sell anything off your bookshelf, consider what you might be passing along to the next reader. I know someone has a class syllabus of mine with Grateful Dead logos drawn all over it.