Saturday Smile
Sorry I’ve missed posting a Saturday Smile the last few weeks…I’m finally on the upswing after my stem-cell procedure. So far so good.
I read a ton of library books while I was recovering, and I was thrilled when the above slip of paper fell out of one of them.
I co-authored The True Tails of Baker and Taylor: The Library Cats Who Left Their Pawprints on a Small Town . . . and the World with the late librarian Jan Louch, and I was shocked when she told me of all the things patrons had used as bookmarks and left behind when they returned the book: personal checks, dried flowers, once a banana peel.
This scrap of paper — which fell out of either The Broken Girls by Simone St. James or You Can Never Die by Harry Bliss, all the books kinda blurred into one another — was written by a young boy. On the flip side of I AM REALLY SORRY LOVE WILLIAM this was scrawled:
robby rules
dont talk in chat.
grow a garden
games
99 nights in a forest
mm2 ccffoffeef tower [or coffee tower after several ineffective erasures.]
So many questions that will never be answered!
Anyway, at least a couple of times a month something will fall out of a book I’m reading, whether a library book or a used book from thrift stores, used bookstores, or online stores. Often it’s the circulation desk slip showing books checked out, which also raises plenty of unanswered questions, which is fine with me.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve found in a used or library book? Leave a comment below!
In other news, my book Propaganda Girls has been nominated at Goodreads for Best History & Biography of 2025!
Can you take a minute to vote for it? Here’s the link.
Many thanks!
Not exactly what you asked for, since I didn't find it myself, but an anecdote on the topic with something to say about authorship and the desire to communicate:
The father of a friend worked in a very obscure branch of physics relating to wave motion. He went to the Library of Congress and checked out a short publication of his research, and slipped a dollar bill between the pages with a note thanking the future reader for taking an interest in his life's work. The punchline: he returned many years later and checked out the book again, and the dollar and note were still there.
(Concern along these lines was one thing that led me to leave the "publish or perish" academic rat race and refocus my professional energies elsewhere.)
Voted! And glad to hear you'll soon be back on your feet.