I once took a critical thinking course and bought the textbook 2nd hand from the college bookstore. A week or two in, I noticed half of a sentence written in the margin. As the professor started teaching the topic from that page, he rhetorically asked a question, did not get an answer, and then answered himself with the sentence from the book. I filliped ahead and found that the entire book was annotated with all of his answers, anecdotes, and various other helpful notes. There was even a table that accurately listed his wardrobe choices! The notes were in several different handwritings, and the book had been resold over a dozen times, so that professor must have been teaching the same class the exact same way for a decade or more. I quickly became a star pupil as I always had an answer ready. I added a few notes along the way and then sold it back to the bookstore at the end of the year. I really wanted to keep it for posterity, but It just seemed wrong to take it out of circulation.
So my version of that story is less analog and arguably less academically honest. I had a somewhat challenging mid-level math class in college where after each homework assignment and test the professor would give us a URL to a PDF of his scanned handwritten completed version of the work. The URL path was something like /math-321/2019/fall/test-1.pdf, and the professor diligently made sure that each file wasn't available until after each test was graded. Unfortunately, the professor was not sufficiently diligent to remove URLs using the exact same pattern for previous years and semesters of the same course. I discovered throughout the course that there had been some trivial changes to the assignments and tests (moving questions around, slightly changing constants, etc.) and only a few non-trivial changes.
Reminds me of over a decade ago I was in a high school AP course. At the start of the course, the teacher recommended we get a AP prep book to study throughout the year, and recommended 2 brands. She specifically said not to get one brand, noting that it was of inferior quality. I had already got the prep book she didn't recommend as I had found it on sale before that remark was made. I later learned that she used that book for all of her test questions, sometimes literally copying the test from the book with minimal editing. I got a 100% on a test out of the blue after averaging in the 80s and then had to make it less obvious.
Similarly, with a slight twist, a prof I had used to recommend we read the entire text book, not just the chapters required for the class. It was an open book exam so people figured they could annotate the pages or whatever and didn't bother to follow his adcice. He would often say, 'everything [we] ever want to know is in that book!'
He was right. The final exam was verbatim the practice exam given at the end of the book. As luck would have it, I had discovered the practice exams a week earlier. Once I realized they were identical to the final, I literally copied the answers and handed it in. It was a 3 hour exam and half the class was done in 15 minutes.
I had one where on the first day of the semester, the very first thing the minute the class started, the professor casually said "if you do every homework problem in the book, you'll get an A on the final."
Not everyone was there on time, some students were going to drop & add the class and most people weren't paying attention.
He casually joked for a couple minutes then settled down to get started.
There was never another hint.
When the final came, each question was verbatim from homework problems that were not assigned.
Here's my little related story. I was in one of my fave used book stores (Baldwin's Book Barn in West Chester, PA) which is not exactly close to where I was living at the time. After browsing for an hour or so and picking out a few books, I spied a title on a top shelf that I thought was interesting but couldn't remember ever seeing before. I pulled the book down and began perusing it, and on the inside cover there was a familiar-looking stamped bookplate that said "Property of <My Name>." I was a little freaked out because I couldn't remember ever owning the book. After thinking about it a few minutes, I dimly recalled lending the book to somebody years ago and I guess it was never returned to me. When I went downstairs to the checkout counter, I showed the older man working that day my ID and the bookplate while telling my story, saying I never got a chance to read this book. He very kindly told me to just take the book and didn't charge me for it, saying "I'm just glad it found its way back to you."
It depends what the class was for. I had a sort of similar experience with a physics class where the professor would take a break mid-exam and just give everyone the answers, but it was a class that was a prerequisite for engineering students who didn't care and really didn't need to, and also a stepping stone for the passionate physics students who did care, but would do the heavy lifting later. The prof was well-regarded for spending his time more on helping with true understanding for the students who cared.
My chapter of Tau Beta Pi (engineering honor society) got so tired of how unfair it was that people would share around old tests and decided to do something about it. Since there is no way to stop people from doing this, we got permission from the dean to start a test and study sheet bank and made it publicly accessible on a website.
Over his whole career as a professor, my father was so concerned about test sharing that he kept a file of every test he ever gave and was careful to never ask the same question twice.
> my father was so concerned about test sharing that he kept a file of every test
I finished 2nd in my high school class (humble brag) because my best friend cheated (and got a zero) for an important biology term paper.
Story:
- My friend hated biology and he decided he would save time by submitting his older brother's bio term paper as his (his brother was 4 years older).
- A month after we handed in our term papers, the bio teacher asks my friend to step into his office, whereupon he shows him a copy of his brother's term paper. Big fat zero.
- It dinged my friend just enough that (even though he was more talented) he finished 3rd in the class.
- I ended up getting a tuition waiver to our state university (where we both went).
That laziness cost him about $10K in tuition (in 1980s dollars).
edit: the person who finished 1st in our class went to Yale. She was more talented than both of us combined.
Errr... many questions can just vary numbers a bit. There's very little value to knowing that the inverse of 3 mod 7 won't be asked this exam - it's trivial to change the numbers and test the same knowledge with a slightly but sufficiently different question.
I imagine there's a somewhat similar type of questions for non-CS disciplines (same case description, different key clue, hence different answer).
It's not entirely trivial, it takes work. If you are simply changing the number but ask the inverse of x mod y every time you didn't win the game. 2 out of 3 times changes nothing.
I had the most fun with multiple choice tests. I took the average A,B,C and D answers from previous tests. The teacher not paranoid would have a lot of B, slightly less A and C and below average D answers. The paranoid teacher would have perfect distribution. The supper paranoid used some kind of RNG which also comes in patterns.
One of each type came to ask me how I did it at the end. The last one was funniest. He had one test with a trick question that everyone got wrong. It just didn't have enough C. One of my answers was more likely wrong than right. I had to go over the A,B,D answer candidates a few times. Reduced the list to 3 potential trick questions. Figured out that 2 of them were correct. Don't ask me why but the remaining one must have been C.
He explained how over his [long] career he started out with to few D answers. I name the other teachers still doing that. He then went for the perfect distribution. I name the teachers still doing that. And now he thought he had the perfect formula. How am I suppose to fix this?? He asked. I'm like, I'm not doing your homework but I do foresee a very interesting meeting with the other teachers.
edit: I did study but cheating was just to much fun. When they switched to tests on computers I made a good bit of money as administrator. I swapped some of the answers around so that the wrong answer was right and everyone got poor grades. They would purchase the list of correct answers from me. Then after they aced it I would reduce their grade to something sensible for the student. When they protested I told them that they paid for answers not for grades. Grades are very expensive as -hey- they could potentially ruin this good thing I got going here!
Am I understanding this comment correctly that you were administering tests and rigging them to cause people to fail and then charging people money to get the rigged answers for the tests so they could pass?
If so, this is some real unethical and criminal behavior.
But I'm inclined to think it's all made up considering the first part of the comment seems to imply that you were doing well on tests simply by guessing the answers based an A,B,C,D distribution. Which is silly as the best you are going to do with that strategy is maybe get a slight hint for a few of the more difficult questions.
> Am I understanding this comment correctly that you were administering tests and rigging them to cause people to fail
They got many answers wrong on the test but I adjusted their grades later. The grades do have to be credible for the show to continue.
> and then charging people money to get the rigged answers for the tests so they could pass?
People who didn't bother to study purchased the answers but if they always had low grades they would forever have low grades.
> If so, this is some real unethical and criminal behavior.
The only thing that really bothered me was this: Modifying the log files left a log entry with a terminal number in the log. I provided the teaches with a fair clue by changing the test answers and indeed eventually they smelled a rat. The cat and mouse game couldn't go on forever, eventually they would figure it out. I picked a scapegoat, a girl who couldn't hurt a fly. It couldn't have happened to a nicer person.
The teachers ganged up around her pointed and shouted then suspended her for a week.
I thought they acted ridiculous so I erased everything from the server and arranged for backups to be formatted when attached.
A few years later I ran into her and apologized but she didn't recall the event.
The teachers were very happy to return to paper based tests.
> unethical and criminal behavior
Ah yes, was I ever that young? We got computers in school and all we were allowed to do was tests. I assure you I've learned quite a lot. For example: Backups should have write protect implemented in hardware. Who in their right mind....
My discrete mathematics course had an oral exam for the final exam. I took it as a summer course and the books didn’t arrive until 1/3 into the class’s.
I felt like I was BSing my entire oral exam but got an A.
I was never the same after that course. 10 hours a day of logical homework fundamentally changed how I thought.
To this day I still cringe when people use phrases like everyone or all without actually meaning the set of everyone in existence.
My digital logic professor was so lazy he reused previous year homework questions on exams and exams were completely open notes.
The old questions were available with answers on old versions of the course website that were still online. Everyone just brought the answers to each exam.
Exams are for you to evaluate your progress, a professor doesn't give a flying duck about your grades, maybe only in the statical sense. You are only lying to yourself.
In a similar vein, I also found a 1950's guide to a happy marriage that had been thoroughly annotated by the husband. He was so honest that it was like finding someone's therapy session notes at a thrift store. The inside cover had a pro-con table, with 'appearance' as the first entry in the con section. Inside the back cover was a game-plan that seemed to indicate that he wanted to strengthen his marriage, so I guess that's nice. I just hope that his wife didn't crack it open before it ended up in the donate pile.
Would love to find that book as I'm sure his annotations help set expectations.
It's nice when you find someone trying to improve there love life when the honeymoon phase is over and the somewhat crushing reality of her/him shortcomings come to the surface.
Not a book, but I just picked up a index card metal box from the Goodwill. Somewhere around 50 index cards, diligently updated with new addresses, half on type half by hand. This guy was in correspondence, or at least subscribed to a half dozen oddball societies, religious groups and more boring local plumbing companies etc. It's a fascinating bit, I think for my next RR&R Challenge, I might try to find out who this guy was. Would make at least for a fun tale cold calling and saying "Hey, can you tell me what the current address you have on file for account #217 is?" . Most recent update looks to be around the year 2000.
I took an intro econ course in college in 1999. The professor gave us his past tests to use as practice and some of them dated back to the late 1950's.
A young man went back to visit his old economics professor, under whom he had studied many years earlier. He took a look at the final exam the professor was preparing to give the students. He said, "Professor, this exam is identical to the one you gave us year ago!"
The professor replied, "That's okay, all the answers have changed."
I took an OS course in 2005. The professor told us we wouldn't have to consider certain classes of scheduler because "none of the real computers the university bought had 'dynamic resource allocation'". I asked what he meant by that, and he said "requests for additional (or free'ing) memory, file handles, and other non-compute resources". I asked which machines had such features, and he replied with something weird like "UNIVAXEN". It was a ridiculous course.
The term is "dynamic storage allocation." We're talking about something so old I'm afraid I can't explain beyond that. I am a mere programmer and I don't wear a lab coat.
sounds like a weird portmanteau of unix and vaxen, a term I have heard used for the old dec vax machines, which did indeed run unix. so, not entirely gibberish, just mostly gibberish.
I took a German literature course in the 90s, the professor used the same quizzes and tests since the early 60s.
A buddy of mine had a copy and I took the class for an easy A. The only gotcha is that you had to be physically present and give him advance notice of you were to be out.
We had the “test of knowledge”, which if you didn’t pass (multiple attempts), you didn’t pass the course.
It was 60 questions in 180 seconds. No hard calculations, just stuff you were an embarrassment to the prof if you passed EM and didn’t know.
He gave it right before break (3 hour class). I got a 96 first attempt. Next highest grade was a 30. He said I could leave as the remainder of class was to go over the test. I literally strutted out and said I was going to have a cold beer. Good times.
That's the sixth book, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince". But if I recall correctly, the original owner of the book, the Half-Blood Prince, was none other than Snape, not Voldemort.
God I thought that was such a weird book. It attempts to build loads of tension around the idea that an old textbook has gasp prewritten notes in it. I know that it tries to imply it might be Voldemort's textbook but even if it was... would that be a huge deal unless it had something useful/interesting specifically about Voldemort? For me at least that part of it fell spectacularly flat
Yeah that is true, and I do kind of remember that. Admittedly it has been a while and I have a (possibly incorrect) memory that it took annoyingly long for him to do that. My memory is also that despite dismissing it as Voldemort this text book was still treated as super ominous even after
Did you read the second book? Voldemort's diary plays a huge part in that one, so it's not surprising that the characters would find Voldemort's text book interesting or ominous (possible horcrux too).
In most cases, somebody just doing the obvious thing at the beginning of the book would have left nothing to write about in the rest. So, they just didn't do that thing.
Recently I read HPMOR and this paragraph was one of many delights there:
The cold in the room seemed to deepen. “A sixth-year Gryffindor cast a curse at one of my more promising students, a sixth-year Slytherin.”
Harry swallowed. “What...sort of curse?”
And the fury on Professor Quirrell’s face was no longer contained. “Why bother to ask an unimportant question like that, Mr Potter? Our friend the sixth-year Gryffindor did not think it was important!”
“Are you serious?” Harry said before he could stop himself.
“No, I’m in a terrible mood today for no particular reason. Yes I’m serious, you fool! He didn’t know. He actually didn’t know. I didn’t believe it until the Aurors confirmed it under Veritaserum. He is in his sixth year at Hogwarts and he cast a high-level Dark curse without knowing what it did.”
“You don’t mean,” Harry said, “that he was mistaken about what it did, that he somehow read the wrong spell description—”
“All he knew was that it was meant to be directed at an enemy. He knew that was all he knew.”
And that had been enough to cast the spell. “I do not understand how anything with that small a brain could walk upright.”
“Indeed, Mr Potter,” said Professor Quirrell.
There was a pause. Professor Quirrell leaned forward and picked up the silver inkwell from his desk, turning it around in his hands, staring at it as though wondering how he could go about torturing an inkwell to death.
“Was the sixth-year Slytherin seriously hurt?” said Harry.
“Yes.”
“Was the sixth-year Gryffindor raised by Muggles?”
“Yes.”
“Is Dumbledore refusing to expel him because the poor boy didn’t know?”
Professor Quirrell’s hands whitened on the inkwell. “Do you have a point, Mr Potter, or are you just stating the obvious?”
“Professor Quirrell,” said Harry gravely, “all the Muggle-raised students in Hogwarts need a safety lecture in which they are told the things so ridiculously obvious that no wizardborn would ever think to mention them. Don’t cast curses if you don’t know what they do, if you discover something dangerous don’t tell the world about it, don’t brew high-level potions without supervision in a bathroom, the reason why there are underage magic laws, all the basics.”
It's very funny. Every chapter has something. From Chapter 48 (about two pages long):
And when Harry had offered that hypothesis, Draco had claimed that he could remember a story - Harry hoped to Cthulhu that this one story was just a fairy tale, it had that ring to it, but there was a story - about Salazar Slytherin sending a brave young viper on a mission to gather information from other snakes.
If any snake a Parselmouth had talked to, could make other snakes self-aware by talking to them, then...
Then...
Harry didn't even know why his mind was going all "then... then..." when he knew perfectly well how the exponential progression would work, it was just the sheer moral horror of it that was blowing his mind.
And what if someone had invented a spell like that to talk to cows?
I thought it was quite good. If you basically like Harry Potter but find it infuriating how often the protagonists problems could have been solved in five minutes if they would have just told the adults... then HPMOR might interest you. Now, it's a didactic book, it's rather long, and you may or may not agree with the author's worldview, so whether you'll really enjoy it I can't say. But it's very well-written and in some ways tells a more "believable" Harry Potter story than the originals.
I feel like basically the only way in which the original Harry Potter story is more believable is that in the original story, almost everyone is impressively thoughtless
Well, in HPMOR, Harry discovers at the end he would have solved a quite major problem very early on if he had bothered to inform Dumbledore of some extremely important facts regarding Professor Quirrel.
Absolutely. It's probably the best book i've ever read.
Describing it as a Harry Potter fanfic is technically accurate but really doesn't do it justice. It's basically a story of what would happen if an extremely smart, educated and technically minded person would do if put into the role of Harry Potter.
Completely agree with other commenter. It's a very interesting read. I don't necessarily agree with every statement but it's a learning experience that is made exceptionally enjoyable by fantastic writing.
Hmm. I disagree with several things in that review, but I think this is su3su2u1’s biggest mistake:
> The author is practically screaming “wouldn’t it be lazy that Harry’s darkside is because he is a horcrux?”
This is completely backwards. Eliezer goes to great lengths to put big clues all over the place that Harry is not a normal 11–year old, with the intent that the reader will _notice_ that something is wrong and try to figure out what it could be. Yes, “Harry is a Horcrux” might feel like an anticlimax, or even a cliche, because that’s how the original books went. But you’re supposed to look even deeper and realize what a horcrux really is. In order to work, a Horcrux has to preserve a copy of the caster’s memories, personality, intentions, etc. What really happened that night in Godric’s Hollow is that Voldemort copied his own memories and personality into the brain of an infant named Harry Potter.
I think it is fair to say that Eliezer is treating this as much like a Fair–Play Mystery as he can, so that it is possible for the user to make correct predictions about the end of the story. Not everyone likes this type of story, but for those who do the game of putting the book down at a certain point so that you can puzzle out the murderer’s identity is a big part of the draw. The “rules” of the Fair–Play Mystery are there to ensure that the author remembers to actually make all the clues available to the reader, that it isn’t always just the butler, etc.
To that end, he has several important scenes that examine the consequences of erasing memories, or adding new ones. The most blatant is when Harry is training with Mr Bester, who has all memory of the training erased after each session. As a result, Mr Bester ends up asking the same questions over and over, and being surprised and troubled by the same revelations each time he reads Harry’s mind. And then of course there is Rita Skeeter, and later Hermione, to hammer the lesson home.
Worst "book" I've ever read, legitimately. I would read almost anything else over that. I've never read the review and I only read 5-6 chapters of the fanfic, but everything in that review rings true. The story was so hollow and lifeless that I couldn't bring myself to read further.
Actually, I agree with lots of the stuff said by the reviewer, but most of them are not such dealbreakers for me as they are for him. At least I read the book as having fun with all the gaps in the wizard world and the personal fantasies of the author are on the back burner.
The reviewer is seemingly an extremely bright and well educated person and also seems to be more familiar with most of the concepts introduced in the books than the original author. The reviewer also an educator and it makes sense that Eliezer's ham-fisted attempts to teach through writing would be annoying to him.
The critique goes deeper. This is where it's most on point:
"So I wonder- is this story ACTUALLY teaching people things? Or is it just a way for people who already know some of the material to feel superior to Hariezer’s many foils?"
Actually that's exactly what rubs me wrong about the entire "rationalist community". A lot of it is convoluted ways for people to congratulate themselves how much smarter than everyone else they are.
Thanks for linking this - I've read HPMOR half a dozen times (because it's entertaining, not because it's a great work of art) and this is a really good and entertaining discussion of it
It starts terrible (I have read extracts of the first chapters to others and they don't fail to get laughs that the author did not intend) but you get used to its and the writer improves making it a very nice read by the end.
Overall, I would recommend to not give up in the first chapters.
Reminds me of a geology professor I had in college. She had a fully photographic memory and recited the entire book, word for word, front to back during class without anything at her lectern. As impressive as that was, it's also what made me skip her class except for tests, because what's the point?
Yeah, once I figured out a professor was teaching straight out of the textbook I’d just skip class and read the book before the tests. Was always the general ed classes nobody cared about, including the instructor, so no harm done.
That element of the Half-Blood Prince was taken from real life. Used textbooks have been preferred by students for precisely for this reason (well, cost too, but this is a well-known benefit) in colleges since... well, probably since textbooks have existed.
Halfway through my college experience (around 2002 or so), the university started putting up blinders in the bookstore while they stocked shelves and wouldn't let you buy your books until basically the first day of class, specifically in an attempt to stymie students finding their books, looking them up, and buying them at 1/10th the price online.
I mean, it wasn't my first experience with the university prioritizing profit over helping students, but it was definitely emblematic.
Most of us figured out that we could get along fine not having the textbook in the first couple of weeks of class. But ultimately, the university was out to actively sabotage the used textbook market. The only source of used books was online. So I never got to experience this community of used book students.
They go through some pretty extreme lengths to get you to waste money on buying books from them. The English classes my university published a new "reader textbook" ever quarter. It was just a crappy bounded letter paper book with section from various novels that they change up every quarter so you couldn't use an old one. The on campus copy center and nearby kinkos/staples/officemax/officedepot wouldn't photocopy it but a half hour drive out would reach stores that didn't care. A photocopy costed about 1/5 of the price the university was selling it at.
Years ago at the university, we had to buy straightup photocopies of articles and such out of books/magazines/whatever that the class would be taught off of at the campus bookstore at prices much higher than per-page copy.
Something about paying the source for licensing and distribution was the reason given.
On the other hand, my physics prof in relativity made us buy photocopies of his lecture notes, since he didn't like any of the available textbooks. (Don't sneer - I'm pretty sure he was better than any of them.) His notes cost, IIRC, $4 for 90-100 pages. This was 1983, but still, four cents a page is pretty good.
I had this one class on Picasso where the professor absolutely refused to use the only real book on the subject because the author didn’t properly give him credit from his thesis research so he handed out a folder of articles we passed around to make copies of. No licensing and distribution fees involved.
Some book publishers also release new versions that change nothing other than make slight changes and reorderings of the exercises so that you can't easily use an old version for your homework assignments.
I remember we had a forum group where 1 person each assignment would go to library to find out which question matched the one in the old book so his or her fellow peers all went out and bought the old one
At my school the savvy students wouldn't buy their books until after the first session of a course anyway, since the professors would often, in that first meeting, explain that some books listed in the syllabus as required were actually optional, or that they'd support some set of older editions of a book than the syllabus listed ("it lists the 5th edition, but it's OK if you get the 4th, and if all you can get ahold of is the 3rd, see me after class and we'll get something sorted out—but nothing older than that").
That's what we did. We waited for the bookstore to open the aisles, found the books, ordered them online, and waited a few weeks to get them. This was before Amazon Prime shipping, you see. The professors were usually sympathetic.
Except my political science prof. So I just dropped the course. Fuck him and his unironic bowtie.
All the students in a course I was teaching apparently were using Chegg for the previous year’s textbook so I decided to use as a supplement (to Strang [which was not the previous year’s book but had all the answers online anyway]) an old Mir publishers book on Diff Eq which I can’t remember exactly how I got (either a bookstore in the French quarter or maybe a library remainder sale).
At any rate it turns out the English printing is so rare not only can it not be found on Libgen - the few copies online are selling for hundreds of dollars (which I certainly would not have paid for it). So not only did I luck into a paper fortune (I suspect this is a rather illiquid market - plus I had to go through and fix a bunch of typos by hand, so much for the Soviet STEM educational complex) the kids _definitely_ couldn’t find this on the Internet.
I may soon - there is a book scanner in the med school library and I doubt very much they care about a Soviet copyrighted book (if USSR even asserted such a thing abroad or Russia does now for them).
Yeah, I actually bought the textbook in '03, a few years before Half-Blood Prince was published. The whole experience did ruin the twist a bit as I saw it coming a mile away.
I don't think the parent is saying that the professor annotated the book, as that probably doesn't make any sense.
As I interpreted their story, the professor had a habit of asking questions and then answering them himself, if nobody offered an answer. Students wrote down those answers in the margins of the book.
Over time, the book collected a lot of these notes from different students.
This is really awesome. It's literally a real-life version of what happens in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. :)
From the wiki page:
`Harry finds an old potions textbook, once belonging to "The Half-Blood Prince", an individual who wrote numerous spells and tips in the book. Harry, using the tips in the book, excels in Potions class, winning a bottle of Felix Felicis, or "Liquid Luck".`
In my middle school German textbook, I found the following note (translation my own):
Hi Katie, we should meet up over tea over these images. The first image should be a simple sketch of two dudes playing football, tell the guys in graphics that the one they gave me is waaa too complex. The second image should be a chick playing tennis.
The note went on in this manner for a couple more sentences, describing all the images on the page. Because I was a blind student who used a screen reader, I had to get the PDF version from the publishing company, which I then put in a specialized ebook reading app for the blind. I strongly suspect that the editors of that book used some PDF tricks for hiding information to post notes to each other. Whether they were alt descriptions, white fonts on white background, regions shrunk to be 1px tall by 1px wide or something else entirely, I do not know. That file was intended for printing, not digital distribution, so I guess that they decided the notes didn't need removing as long as they weren't visible.
Modern versions of Chrome and Edge have features that try to guess what an image contains using AI techniques. Same with iOs and Mac OS. Modern iPhones even try to recognize controls on the screen, but my phone is too old for that to work. These solutions are still in their infancy, though, and therefore far from perfect. They might help us jump through a small accessibility hurdle once in a while, but without serious accessibility work from developers, we're doomed anyway.
I'll one-up this a bit: a blind woman called Kristy Viers demonstrates on YouTube how she uses various things, among them iPhone with the onscreen six-finger Braille keyboard. But also she uses the ‘magnifier’ app to tell her what is there around her, i.e. what the camera sees: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8CAafjodkyE
(The videos are filmed by her boyfriend, in case someone has to wonder.)
I realize that the vid is not too informative to a blind person, other than a vague demo. IDK where to find more info on the setup, since I'm not a user of iPhones myself. Comments on YouTube say that the magnifier app is in the accessibility options, that it adds a home screen app when enabled, and that it works at least on iPhone 10 since that's what Kristy uses.
I would also guess that such usage requires persistent mobile connection and consumes considerable traffic and battery—but again, with modern tech magic I won't bet against it working locally on the phone.
On Android, the feature called ‘Lens’ in the Google's camera app can describe some things, more useful to seeing people IMO: e.g. the model of a car—basically the same as Google's image search does, these days. Also purportedly can read and translate text signs. But IDK how far that goes, never heard of it doing stuff like those descriptions by the iPhone magnifier.
I checked the magnifier app on my iPhone 6s and couldn’t find anything related to narrating what it sees.
It’s very possible that recognition happens locally, Apple has been making efforts in this direction for other functions (photos) but maybe the 6s is just too old and can’t do it.
As far as I understand, the narration is handled by the ‘voiceover’ feature, which is a generic accessibility feature, precisely the one that reads screen contents and controls. In the demo, Kristy taps the screen each time to invoke the voiceover description.
iPhone 6S shipped with iOS 9 but is upgradable to the current 15.6. Though features may indeed depend on the particular phone, i.e. the hardware.
Also, apparently Voiceover changes the way the phone should be controlled, to its own set of gestures—so it's not a feature to use just with the camera. However, it sounds to me like blind users would find it helpful anyway.
> He looked around at the faces in the crowd and said, “I’m opening the bidding at one dollar.” I about shit myself. I bid the $1 immediately to get things rolling. Well, after I bid, he looked around and said, “Once, twice, sold that man there for $1.” I just laughed… and wondered how the Hell I was going to get this pallet home and what I was going to do with all those books.
> When I asked the auctioneer afterwards why he’d let it go so cheaply, he said, “Did you see anyone trampling you to get in a bid?” I said no, I didn’t. His reply, with a smirk on his face, was, “Gotta’ know your audience in this job.”
> Well, needless to say, I got the books home and spent a few years going through them and selling some, giving some away, etc. However, that’s not the point of this story. The point was finding things in books. So, with that in mind…
Dude goes to an auction and finds books. Nobody bids on the books. Dude is amazed that the auctioneer is willing to sell him something nobody wants for a low price. Dude spends years going through those books.
The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars (sold individually on the second-hand book market, after being carefully catalogued etc.), but nobody interested in buying books happened to be at the auction and the auctioneer set a $1 minimum bid because he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. The auction house could surely get significantly more for their books if they knew the right venue to sell them (somewhere frequented by used booksellers), but I guess it wasn’t worth their trouble to figure out where that might be.
This is sort of like the time I went to a car auction as a kid and some college students bought a lightly used stretch limo in perfect working order for (the minimum bid of) $100.
In the late 90s in Atlanta I got my first ever Mac computer (Performa iirc??) at an estate sale for free because it was "broken". The way we established that it was broken was because the power switch on the back of it did not do anything. I got home, did some light digging on the internet and determined that the power switch on the back is the main power, and that actually turning on the computer involved pushing one of the keys on the keyboard.
> he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale.
This reminds me of one of the strangest things I ever read in the books:
My Arabic Library
About eighteen months before I arrived in Iraq, one of my predecessors had ordered My Arabic Library, $88,000 worth of books, an entire shipping container. My Arabic Library was a Bush-era, US government–wide project to translate classic American books, so we now have Tom Sawyer, The House of the Seven Gables, and Of Mice and Men in Arabic. The Embassy had big plans for the books, claiming, “It is so important that the children of Baghdad, the next generation of leaders of Iraq, obtain basic literacy skills. A love of learning and literacy will mean better job opportunities for them when they grow up. They will be able to better support their families and help build a more prosperous Iraq.”
Everyone forgot about the books until we learned that a truck was bringing them in from Jordan. After our prayers that the driver would abandon the truck en route failed, my team was stuck with the problem of what to do with a container of books that no one wanted. Apparently, there was little interest among Iraqi schools in reading The Crucible or Moby-Dick, as the books didn’t fit into their centralized curriculum. I was charged with getting rid of them, to anywhere; the lucky winner needed only a truck. We cajoled a nearby school to take the whole mess from us as a personal favor. Their only condition was that they would not have to do the loading themselves, so that is how a couple of us ended up humping books into a flatbed truck while a high school principal and a local truck driver sat in the shade smoking, watching us. We heard later from a third party that, failing to sell the books on the black market, the principal just dumped them behind the school.
Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
This was very strange to me cause I used to think of American government as very efficient, and with experience of solving exactly the same problem many times already - Germany, Japan, Korea. And the thought that somebody could just waste my yearly taxes on nothing - was very strange and disturbing.
> “It is so important that the children of Baghdad, the next generation of leaders of Iraq, obtain basic literacy skills. A love of learning and literacy will mean better job opportunities for them when they grow up. They will be able to better support their families and help build a more prosperous Iraq.”
Baghdad, before the invasion, was known for the high percentage of readers compared to other cities in the Middle East. We -Arabs- had a saying: "Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads." I doubt the above quote being the true goal of "My Arabic Library" project. I guess it was an attempt to change the culture of people by exposing them to American literature, which would help eventually the political cause of US government in Iraq.
I can’t speak for the mind of the State Department, obviously - but I guess the main purpose of the project was to advance its author’s career. Van Buren’s book is full of such projects, whose main goals were to look good on American television - just once is good. Total lack of a strategic vision.
But if there was a strategic vision in some unseen echelons of American decision making - its goal does not look like to make Iraq successful.
The idea of sending books that are deeply close to American history seems like an obviously terrible idea. Yeah no shit that wasn't going to resonate with an Iraqi child. A lot of these books are culturally foreign to American kids.
Great books are often cross-cultural. We Russian kids enjoyed Tom Sawyer very much. “It”s not every day that a boy gets a chance to paint a fence”… There was (and is) a lot of buzz in Russian culture about Moby Dick though I personally failed to enjoy it. Never heard of Of Mice and Men though - probably because our communists were rather puritanic.
I think problem was that planting a book-reading habits require a lot more work than providing books.
I'm not sure I agree with this. The prices that things sold at might have been cheaper 20 years ago, but the advent of the web with used-goods marketplaces has allowed people to access things that were previously not available or hard to find.
I can go onto ebay and order things from the US that were never available locally in my home country. The same with Yahoo! Auctions for items sold only to the Japanese market. And not only can I access things that I couldn't before, but I can easily search for things. Want a copy of an obscure record? No need to search dozens of local stores - Discogs will probably have a few copies for sale. Need a book to complete a collection? Try a quick search on Amazon or Abebooks.
While the prices that things sell for may be higher, I find that it is considerably easier to collect things now than it would have been before the web.
I mostly agree, but there are exceptions. For my birthday a couple years ago my son showed up with a couple cardboard boxes full of books. Turned out to be a complete set of "Great Books of the Western World," worth well over $1,000. He had picked it up for about $30 at an estate sale a couple days before.
I bought a bunch of architecture books a few years ago at an estate sale for $5. Flipped through them and my son looked them up on eBay - we sold the collection for several thousand dollars.
I quite recently bought a used book for something like $100. Certain books can be expensive, it was not a popular or particularly good book, but the writer was a character and I guess therefore his written books are valuable niche items... Also no more will be printed, so there is limited supply. Similar for some old music sheets or records.
However these are definitely not liquid, if you are going to sell them you maybe have to store them for a long time.
Idk with the amount of books referenced and the definitive fact the some of them were resold at least indicates a good chance of making thousands of dollars, otherwise It’s logical to assume if the effort has not been worth it the author would have commented as such.
A lot of older books that are now out of print often run many hundreds of dollars, if not more. For example, I've been trying to find a complete unabridged edition of Fraser's Golden Bough, which isn't that niche - you'll find it cited somewhere in any work on mythology- and it seems to run in the high-hundreds to low thousands. A quick look shows a first edition selling for 12k all by itself.
Similarly, I'm looking for the complete Collected Works of Carl Jung, and that's got a hefty price too. Maybe one day. :)
I'm sure both of these examples are sitting in some old man's study and are getting sold for nothing at estate sales, if they aren't just thrown in a dumpster or pulped after being donated to a library that can't get rid of them either. But nobody is indexing estate sales.
But a pallet of old academic books is unlikely to be composed of such books. It is probable that most of the books are worth less than the cost of shipping, and some of the books will have some value but not tremendous value. It is astonishing the number of wonderful, high quality books that can be bought on Abebooks for $1.
Did you look at the picture? https://i.imgur.com/0qiTKSQ.jpg Books I commonly buy secondhand that look roughly like those pictured are anywhere from $10–$200 each (depending on how common the particular book/edition is); we’re talking about pretty ordinary old academic books, nothing fancy or extremely rare. A pallet of books is ~500–1000 books (there are maybe 400 in the picture, but the blog author claims that is a "sampling").
That's selection bias because you are only looking at books that you actually wanted. An average book is worth much less than a book that someone actually wants.
An average (~worthless) book is something like a pulp romance novel, political book by a sitting politician, self-help guide, .... These are printed in the millions and used copies can typically be found for $1–$5 + shipping costs. That’s not the same kind of books primarily shown/described here.
Any scholarly person who loves old hardback books and spends a few decades collecting ones they personally want or need is going to end up with some worthless books, a large number that sell for $10–50 each, and a few that are worth hundreds each. It’s just inevitable, unless they go out of their way to only collect junk.
If I had to guess I’d put the price of the old man’s collection in the $10k–$30k range. But it’s plausible it could be more, if he collected anything rare.
I have a book printed less than 5 years ago that routinely sells for $800 online now. The niche religious press that published it simply cannot keep all of the authors work in print and his more academic work gets printed maybe once a decade in a run of 1000.
The article said, "there were some very old, and often valuable, books in this boxes," which is somewhat difficult to interpret but seems to be saying that many of the books were valuable in the sense of fetching a high price, unlike those sold on the rather offensive page you link.
Good auctioneers make sure that there is a buyer for specific things like that. I'm surprised that there wasn't a used book buyer in the crowd. Though maybe his guy didn't show up.
It's a Salvation Army auction. I imagine the main purpose is to dump stuff that they haven't found any other use for. They get all this stuff for free, any money they happen to make from an auction is just a nice bonus.
Exactly this - and 99% of the time a “pallet of books from Salvation Army/Goodwill” will be entirely romance novels and cookbooks and not worth the pulp.
That depends. For things they expect to go be worth a lot they want two buyers. However for things like scrap metal they just want one buyer - they know that buyer will get a great deal, but the value in scrap isn't high enough to support two and so getting a second buyer means both will disappear soon.
In the late 1990s, after watching the movie WarGames (1983), I saw a scene where Matthew Broderick's character is researching the computer scientist Stephen Falken to try to guess his password. There was a brief glimpse of a Scientific American magazine cover[1] titled "Falken's maze: Teaching a machine to learn". That sounded fascinating and I went to the university library to find that issue of Scientific American in bound periodicals. As you have likely already guessed, it turned out that the cover had been faked for the movie and that the actual cover was something completely different. But someone had handwritten on the cover page: "I bet you were looking for Falken's maze!"
Watching the film The Last Emperor I noted the scene in which a TIME photographer was present for the Emperor's coronation (as a Japanese puppet). The thought occurred that this quite probably was an actual occurrence, and that there should be an article corresponding to the story. My uni library had a collection of back issues, and sure enough, I found the article and read it ... an interesting corroboration, counterpoint, and expansion to what was shown in the film (remarkably true to life as best as I could tell).
I realize it is not the same as finding a friend, but I recently found five crisp $20 bills in a used logic text book at an Amvets thrift store. I opened the book because it was written by Irving Copi, who wrote my undergrad logic text. I was paranoid it was counterfeit, but it was very much real money. To make things better, the first $20 I spent was to get a pizza and the employee said a mistake happened at the pizzeria and they accidentally made too many pies and gave me an extra large pie for free. I was on a roll.
I was with my girlfriend at a restaurant whose decor was filled with a bunch of old furniture and knickknacks. Next to our table was a stack of books. My girlfriend opened the top one and inside the cover was a bunch of money - maybe $200 in twenties?
Over dinner we talked about what to do about this, and ultimately she added $20 more to the stash and left it in the book.
I went through a couple years where I was finding cash kind of a lot. Not life changing amounts, but something.
At work in the secure area when locking up I found a 10 inside the door. I didn't know what to do with it so I tacked it on the bulletin board by the door. Really obvious. Nobody took it for 2 weeks (which is kind of remarkable), so I took it back to buy lunch.
I found a twenty in the snow on the street in cambridge. But it was new snow and easy to follow the tracks. It led to the security guard at the University. He was really thankfully to have it back.
Later that spring I found a crumpled $50 blowing down the street. It was near the faculty club. "Tumble Money" my partner said. Also 50s aren't really common. I kept 30 and donated 20 to charity.
But lamentably my good fortune in the finding of cash has come to an end. Perhaps the rise of the credit card changed my fortunes.
> At work in the secure area when locking up I found a 10 inside the door. I didn't know what to do with it so I tacked it on the bulletin board by the door. Really obvious. Nobody took it for 2 weeks (which is kind of remarkable), so I took it back to buy lunch.
When I've worked in secure areas, I've never had the slightest concern about theft. We even did an experiment where we left a couple $1 bills out on the table in the coffee area for a week... anybody could have picked them up, especially the security guards and janitors who roamed the building at night with nobody else around, but they just stayed there.
Working in that sort of high-trust environment is really, really nice.
There are some places in Asia where you can go to a coffee shop, let your $1000+ laptop on a table, go for a 30 mins walk, come back and nothing happened neither to your laptop or your bag. I actually do it all the time.
I'm sure I could be gone all day and nothing would happen but after 40 mins some instinct kicks in and I feel the urge to go back check everything's still there.
Kind of related, I had some instant noodles that I didn't much care for, so I taped some money to them and left them with a note in a common area anonymously saying that I would pay someone to take them. I had to add more money a few times before someone did. It's amusing to invert the system.
If I still worked in such a place, I'd be willing to try the experiment with $100.
On the other hand I'd speculate that in a workplace, people are more likely to pick up $3 than they are to pick up $100. "It's just a couple bucks, somebody probably just forgot it here"
> I found a twenty in the snow on the street in cambridge.
The most money I've found was in Cambridge (USA), in Harvard Square.
There was an envelope/paper on the ground of a traffic island, and in it was a bunch of cash. I couldn't see anyone around who might've just dropped it, so, on a hunch, I walked into the nearest bank. I waited in line, got to the teller, and said, this is a long shot, but did they happen to know who dropped this money. As I was saying that, someone off to the side spoke up and said it was them. They'd been making the deposit for the nearby small store where they worked. They offered me a big discount in the store.
Other than that, I track found pennies in GnuCash, to have an accurate accounting of my luck and/or sidewalk germ exposure.
This goes back to when my daughter was little, many years pre-covid. Whenever we went to a pizza restaurant that had a mini arcade with games and vending machines, she would check all of the change return trays. And inevitably, she would come back with a quarter or two. Every time. I figured maybe it was luck coming from her Irish ancestry.
I found $20 on my
block this morning in New Orleans. It belonged to my neighbor across the street fixing his car. He offered me a beer at 945 in the morning. I guess this city is a high trust environment :D
>But lamentably my good fortune in the finding of cash has come to an end. Perhaps the rise of the credit card changed my fortunes.
I'm a moderator of /r/silverbugs and we see some fun ones sometimes, if you pop over there and search "coinstar" you'll find the occasional post where members check the coin return on coinstar machines (you dump coins into a hopper, it gives you a gift card/credit at the store) and find 90% silver coins as the machines tend to reject them. Sadly all I've ever found is a nasty penny or two and a 1 euro coin which I think I chucked in the trash given I'm in central Indiana.
My father once lost quite a large amount of cash that was supposed to be used for an overseas family trip. It was a very awkward situation in our family, because he had the slight suspicion that one of us children could have taken the money. Luckily, about a year later my brother opened a large book on seafaring from my fathers shelf and found an envelope with exactly the missing sum. Only then my father remembered that he had hidden the money there and we could procees with our holiday plannings.
Cash is always interesting. Cash in a logic book too, that seems like clean money!
One time in Japan there was a car sitting in front of my apartment for months, nobody used it, nobody touched it. It seemed abandoned. It definitely looked out of place due to its age as well, though it was in good shape.
Eventually me and the pals got amused, and annoyed, and started to do funny stuff you'd only do if amused and annoyed by an abandoned car. Like, trying the doors on one restless day while you wait for the yakimo hours to arrive.
Unlocked!
A bunch of sports gear, cassettes.
Hatchback?
Sports gear...uh...sexy times stuff...and uh...a purse.
A peek in the purse. My first time seeing thick bundles of cash, basically $100s! Stacks of 'em!
I watched enough movies to know that loose $100s, found loosely, may be OK to take, or even just to ask somebody about.
But bundles, in a purse, in an abandoned car, in a neighborhood where we had heard some organized crime rumors...nope.
Creepy af though. We wondered if she had run away, disappeared, what.
I lent one my cool science fiction books to a good friend, and once I got it back and decided to re-read it myself, found that he was using a $10 canadian as bookmark. It's one of my bookmarks now, although I may use it next time I go to Vancouver. Maybe. It's pleasantly plasticky in that ineffable "Canadien" way.
Just before covid started a friend of mine found a $100 bill in a purse at Goodwill, all of our friends went nuts on Facbeook reporting back on all the random (never money) stuff they were finding in pockets of purses/garments at Goodwill over the next couple of weeks.
When I was 13, I checked out Steven Levy's "Hackers" from the public library.
Inside I found a handwritten note from a 14 year old boy which said something to the effect of "If you like stuff like this, call me!" So I did! We ended up being friends for a couple years and exchanging C64 software and talking about nerd stuff.
that's a great story. before the internet there were no easy ways to find others who were into computers. as far as i can remember i was the only one in my school who would hang out in the schools computer room after classes. i am pretty sure there were other kids in other schools that were interested in computers, but i had no way of finding them. meeting someone like that would have been great.
We used to place ads in a newspaper to find fellow Commodore/Amiga/Spectrum/Atari users to trade games with. It was not uncommon that my Saturdays involved my parents dropping me off at some random person's house (which might or might not have been my age) and picking me up a few hours later.
These days this would not fly... The risk of dropping a kid at some stranger's house all alone with a few floppies or tapes in this day and age could get a parent a stern visit from social services. But it was acceptable in the 80s...
nonsense. as soon as i have an address and a name, they are not a stranger anymore. i know exactly where my kids are, and no social services can tell me who i am allowed to trust and associate with.
heh, sorry, a wink or /s would have helped. the problem is that i believe there are people who actually think that way. reality is stranger than fiction.
There was a manga comic series called "20th Century Boys" which was a conspiracy thriller mixed with 1970s Japanese nostalgia. One of the story's scenes involved the protagonists rummaging through a library looking for a particular book. When they find the book and open it, a scrap of paper from decades ago falls out, which happens to be the vital clue to move the plot forward.
When you are reading the comic book, right as you come across the scene where the heroes open the book, when you turn to the next page the same scrap of paper seen in that scene falls out of the actual book you're holding. That sent chills down my spine when I first encountered it; pretty genius.
Years ago, I went into this third hand style book shop. It is located in the bottom of a church basement in the Midwest. It is the type of place you can get a grocery bag full of books for $30. Oddly, they also had some full sets of various encyclopedia books for free. I thought it could be an interesting set to have around so I grabbed one. It was a New Illustrated Columbia Encyclopedia 1975.
Months later, I was looking something up for fun. It was not a book I had touched yet, and I found the following letter hand written on a sheet of lined notebook paper. I found it oddly interesting and tried looking the names a few times. I did not get anywhere near the article story, wish I had.
“Being of sound mind and body, declare this to be my last will and testament.
To my mother, I leave nothing.
To my father, I leave Farrah and the wish to be cremated and scattered over aspen, Colorado.
To Rhonda Sollberger, I leave my cat, puffer, my rabbit, Oliver, my model house collection, and my stereo.
To Tony I leave Karen.
To Karen I leave Tony.
To Gail, I leave my teddy bear, and my rainbow sweater (She’ll grow into it soon.)
To Heather Bright, I leave my Canada Dry can, and my tequila bottle.
To Mark Frang, I leave him feeling guilty and gray skico. Also some of my ashes are to be sprinkled in his room, to remind him the sad that I am not here is all his fault.
To Adheimme Boman, I leave all the items in my play house that belong to her. 13235 is the combination.
To Todd Glass, I leave my Muppit poster (It’s just his type!)
I bought my brother a book as a gift. A book I love called "powers of 10" which is a series of pictures each taken from an order of magnitude greater distance. It starts with atoms and goes all the way up to the milky way. It's such a good way to understand the relative size of things in our universe.
I bought it used on Amazon. It was an old library book that still had the sleeve and index cards with the date stamps of when it was last checked out.
This particular book, that I bought sight unseen from Amazon, used, for my brother's birthday had only been checked out once in its life at the library. It was last checked out on my brother's exact birthday. The book I randomly bought him had a stamp of his exact birthday, only.
Talk about going from thinking we're so small in the universe to that kind of coincidence.
A couple years ago I was trying to get ahold of Michael Spivak's Differential Geometry series. It was impossible to find copies of the book without paying 4 figures on sketchy listings off eBay, Craigslist, Amazon, or AbeBooks. Eventually I decided to dig around and see if I could contact him directly. When I found his contact info, I kindly wrote him an email, to which he took several months to respond. After several months of waiting for a reply, he surprisingly responded to me several months later. We continued to communicate and I sent payment to him via PayPal, and received the books. It was only a few months later that I found out he had passed away. I just found out, per a PDF on tug.org, that "he suffered a broken hip earlier in the fall, and had been confined to an extended care facility following that mishap."[1] Very sad to see him go, but I am forever grateful that he took the time to patiently work with me to obtain copies of his books. Today, his books are all available at mathpop.com, it seems the distributor got the series hooked into Amazon so they're more easily accessible.
I wrote about this once before, but I had a very similar situation, except with family photos instead of books. The story was that someone's apartment was cleared out after they were evicted. Well, after a few years of the stuff sitting in storage, I got around to looking through it, and with a bit of sleuthing, I tracked down the person who the family photos belonged to and gave them a call.
The call did not go well. It is certainly possible that I could have approached the phone call better, and maybe I should have tried harder, but they were suspicious, rude, and quite possibly upset. So I never took the family photos to them, and eventually disposed of them.
You really never know how people will respond to having their past thrust at them like this. Or how they'll respond to strange phone calls.
You really never know how people will respond to having their past thrust at them like this. Or how they'll respond to strange phone calls.
I've bought many books over the years that had prior owner's names marked inside somewhere. On a few occasions I've bothered to try and identify/find the person in question. Once or twice I was successful, but I never bothered contacting them just to say "Hey, I bought this book you used to own". Well, except for one time.
I was on an Inductive Logic Programming / Prolog kick, and bought several used books on the subject. Something like two or three had all been owned by the same previous owner. I looked him up and found out that he was an academic and appeared to still be working, so I thought "what the heck" and sent him a note just to say "Hey, funny story, I bought these books and <blah, blah, blah>."
Not sure what I expected, if anything, in return, but the response I did get was quite chilly. It was something along the lines of "Oh, I donated those to a place that was supposed to be sending them to Africa" or something like that. There was definitely no sense that this individual was happy to hear from the new owner of his old books, or was interested in discussing the subject.
Which is fine. Like I said, I had no idea what to expect, and certainly would have had no right to expect any particular response. But it just goes to show... you are correct in saying
"You really never know how people will respond to having their past thrust at them like this. Or how they'll respond to strange phone calls." (or strange emails in this case)
When I was young, my collection of books ebbed and flowed based on how much spare cash I had. In lean times, I'd end up selling them, then eventually accumulate more. Once I got my career on a more consistent path, I collected books and ended up with a pretty diverse set, but in the back of my head I used the fact that I hadn't sold them as a barometer for my financial stability. Anyway, a couple of years ago, at the behest of my wife, I went through and culled about 1/3 of them. Took them to Half Price Books, where I was offered $8 for the lot. At first I was a little taken aback by that price, but then I realized I was handing them a box of the shittiest books I owned. If anyone doxes me to tell me how lovely their third-hand copy of Chilton's 1984 Audi 4000 manual is...I mean I would congratulate them for their effort, but I don't exactly sit around pining about a reconnection to that book.
When I moved out of my parent's home I of course left a bunch of random stuff behind including a few boxes of books that I didn't want to haul. Left them in the garage and forgot about them. A few years later my dad was cleaning up the darker corners of the garage and called me up, 'Hey there are some boxes of books in the garage, do you want them or can I just take them to goodwill.' I didn't want them at the time, I hadn't wanted them for years and I couldn't be bothered, so he ended up donating them.
A few years later I got a hankering to read the Dune series again and realized that they had been in one of those boxes. So I went to a used bookstore and found all the original dune books but god emperor. A few weeks later in another used bookstore I found a copy of god emperor. A beat up paperback, beat up in a very particular way. I flipped to the inner back cover where I found my initials. Apparently somehow my copy of god emperor donated out on the kitsap peninsula years before made it's way into a second hand book shop in seattle where I repurchased it.
If anyone doxes me to tell me how lovely their third-hand copy of Chilton's 1984 Audi 4000 manual is.
Fair enough. But at the same time, I'd almost bet that somewhere, out there, is some person who sold their copy of the Chilton's 1984 Audi 4000 manual, but JUST LOVED THAT CAR, and loves all things Audi, and would be tickled to tears to meet another Audi owner/enthusiast, etc, yadda yadda. That connection would probably result in the two individuals becoming lifelong friends or something.
In the 80's my family lost a suitcase of family photos and letters. Literally fell of a truck in the middle of Siberia. a few year later they were reunited with them thanks to a stranger who found them and tracked my family down (obviously this was pre-internet). My family was very grateful.
You can beat yourself up over it, but the reality is that you're right: Some people handle the past differently from others.
You did the right thing by attempting to reunite them with their (presumably) priceless property. Most people likely wouldn't react this way. I know my parents lost a TON of personal items, including countless photos, when the moving company that was hired by the USAF to move them out of CA to another assignment went under. I'd imagine they'd both have been amazed, surprised, and incredibly grateful for someone to have gone through the trouble you did.
...but who knows? Perhaps there was a divorce or bad blood in that family. At least you can say for certain you have a clear conscience, though!
> I know my parents lost a TON of personal items, including countless photos, when the moving company that was hired by the USAF to move them out of CA to another assignment went under.
I'm close to someone who grew up in the military and lost ~all their family photos and childhood things the same [EDIT: "a similar", rather] way. A little bit lost with every move, nearly all of it gone by the end. Might be a common problem for folks in the military even if something weird like the moving company going under mid-move doesn't happen.
I think you're right, unfortunately. If it's not lost wholesale (as in my parents' case) it's a war of attrition.
They had a number of interesting artifacts (my mother's Australian) and other items that would've been of value for posterity's sake. Especially now that my father has since passed--photographs from his earlier years would have been worth much more to us now.
As a Christian, I'm not hugely fussed over the loss of the material things, but the archivist in my heart is pained to no end!
I found a bunch of books and photo albums sitting out for garbage collection.
The albums were full of family photos stretching over years. I tracked down the owner via facebook. She had moved to another country and -- I suspect had separated from her husband.
She was not interested in the photo albums. It seemed rather poignant. I wonder what the story was behind it.
This has nothing to do with books, but my (now ex) wife and I met another couple many years ago, and we were friendly for a short while until they moved away. A year later, my wife got an itch to talk to the other wife. She had no address or contact info, but my wife was part bloodhound at this sort of thing, remembered her mentioning her parents in another state, and eventually tracked them down to see if she could get the other lady's contact info.
The other lady called my wife back... and the conversation went something like "how did you find me? Please don't ever contact me or my parents again, just pretend you never met me, and please, please, don't ever let my husband know where I am."
My dad died a couple of months ago and I'm still sorting through his and my mother's stuff, including a lot of books.
I discovered in one of them he'd written a fake dedication from the author "To ____ who could have written this far better than I".
And in the front of a copy of Tristram Shandy he'd written: "This is the 3rd copy I have bought. All the others have been STOLEN. If I ever get to read it I may find out why!"
This might be giving away some secret of sorts but here we go:
Sarasota is a unique place.
Goodwill maintains dedicated bookstores - selling books at $2 each. Needless to say the stores are always well visited. There are always new amazing books streaming through. I once met a young bookseller lady from Houston who drove all the way to fill her truck with books from here.
And, as the article hinted at, the area itself acts twofold: as a magnet and a filter. Being an artsy famous cultured beach town it attracts the often rich and successful retirees who, after having spent a life of collecting books but then because of age and many moves having to narrow down their collection end up with the best of the best books on any topic thus singled out and neatly brought to Sarasota. When these fine folks pass away they leave the treasures for the rest of us (unless their children have any idea what they are just about to give away). So, very often, you would bump into a new book, look at the artful ‘Ex libris’ sticker left on the first page and realize another collection of someone interesting just arrived. To honor those I usually try to pick up all their treasures and add them to my own collection which the kids have been instructed to keep together and hand down over the centuries…
I bought a Ti-92 graphing calculator in the early 2000's for very cheap, couple dollars, secondhand.
I found this odd because at the time they still went for a lot of money. Inside the very large battery door[1] I found a person's name and phone number. I thought about contacting them to see if it was stolen, but first I googled the name and found a several month old local news article about the person dying in a helicopter crash of all things. Very strange.
Not the strangest thing in the world, but I'm currently on a Mark Twain reading binge. He's absolutely amazing - if all you've read of his is Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, you need to read his non-fiction travelogues. His observations were prescient almost beyond belief, and his acerbic humor is laugh out loud funny.
Here's the strange bit: His book "Roughing It" is about his experience as a young man of moving to the West, spending a few years in Nevada and San Francisco, and then visiting The Kingdom of Hawaii where he tried surfing. In 1865.
> In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing. Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea, (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell! It did not seem that a lightning express train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed. I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself.—The board struck the shore in three quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me. None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.
Sam embraced and exaggerated his "Southern gentleman" Mark Twain persona later in life so much, the idea that earlier in life he was in Hawaii, hanging out and surfing is quite amusing to me. Victorian surfing?? Who knew?
"Roughing It" is one of my all time favorite books. I grew up around Virginia City (Reno/Carson) and will be moving back to that region in a couple of weeks. It remains one of my favorite books. I need to give it another read.
Nice! I live in the Bay Area and been to Tahoe a bunch of times, though never to the Nevada side. I didn’t know anything about the Comstock Lode besides the name. It’s an amazing story. But is Virginia City just sitting on top of a massive empty mine to this day??
Twain’s descriptions of how empty Tahoe was then are pretty incredible to imagine. He guessed that they may have been the only people camping on the lake at the time.
The part where he accidentally starts a raging forest fire that spreads over the mountains is much less humorous today, I have to admit. Hopefully it was one of the times he was exaggerating for effect.
Oh man, you have got to visit Virginia City. Yes, it's really sitting on top of mines. And you can do some mine tours. It's a bit on the touristy side, but I have a picture of me and my family visiting there in the early 80's, and then another pic from almost the same spot (quite coincidentally!) just a couple of months ago, and not a lot has changed.
There are also excellent museums in Carson City. And, you can take the train from VC down to CC! Something I have yet to do, but am going to do soon.
If you need a local contact, hit me up. username at gmail.
1) A note from one feminine-name to another assuring her that the book it was in (which was a gift, evidently, and this the accompanying card) would be a good start to her college journey, and wishing her success. It's a Modern Library copy of Plato's Republic published in IIRC the '50s. The hand and condition of the note fit with its having been gifted around that time—so, probably it was gifted new, not long after the publication date. Found it really touching for some reason, always wished (voyeuristically, I suppose) I could learn how all that turned out.
2) Set of Ex Libris stickers in the front of a multi-volume Folio Society history of England identifying it as from the library of a moderately well-known (so I gather—I'd not heard of 'em) 1980s Conservative British politician (I'm in the US, and the online listing I bought them from made no note of this). Had a title, too, Lord something-or-other. Judging from the tightness of the spines I don't think they'd ever been opened, probably just office decoration. Now that I think about it, I should see if I can track down photos of the guy's office and spot these in the background... 5-volume set, so it might be possible to pick them out even in a poor photo.
3) Late 19th century reading-size catholic bible that must have been a family bible, because it had about a hundred years of family history in it, up to IIRC the 1920s, going all the way back to "The Old Country". I've held on to it for years because I keep thinking I should do something to preserve that or get it to someone who cares, but realistically, probably never will.
OMG your 3) could be extremely valuable to the family. Check ancestry.com and see if you can find any of the family; descendents that appear in the tree – if any – are most likely to be the ones that would die to have the book and you may be able to look them up and contact them.
About 15 years ago, I purchased a hardcover copy of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, published in 1946. Inside the cover was the following inscription:
Ambassador Douglas (in pencil)
Geyelin,
4511 Cath. Ave. N.W. (in pen)
Intrigued, I started researching the names and dates. Here's what I pieced together.
In 1947, Philip L. Geyelin, then working at the Wall Street Journal, gave the book as a gift to Lewis Williams Douglas, who had recently become the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom. (Geyelin had joined the Journal in 1946 and probably would have known the book's author, Henry Hazlitt, who was also at the Journal at that time.) My hunch is that the book was given to influence Douglas's thinking about economic policies that should be adopted to restore the UK and Europe after World War II.
As it turned out, Douglas was instrumental to the passage and implementation of the Marshall Plan.
1. I bought a 500 year-old book full of engravings that turned out to have pictures of UFOs in it
2. I became obsessed with Luna Park, an influential proto-Disneyland based in Coney Island 100+ years ago. It was so popular they ran light rail out there and hundreds of thousands of people went there every weekend until it burned down about a decade later. Took a book about it on vacation to Paris. Went to a random place to read, and it had a little concourse named Luna Park. Inside it was a random coin-op machine named Luna Park, not related to the concourse from what I could tell.
3. I was studying songs by the lyricist Jule Stein, a New Yorker. One day I went into a used bookshop on the other side of the country in Newport Beach, CA just to browse. I found a bunch of books with his bookplate in them. (Nothing musical, sadly.)
>2. I became obsessed with Luna Park, an influential proto-Disneyland based in Coney Island 100+ years ago. It was so popular they ran light rail out there and hundreds of thousands of people went there every weekend until it burned down about a decade later. Took a book about it on vacation to Paris. Went to a random place to read, and it had a little concourse named Luna Park. Inside it was a random coin-op machine named Luna Park, not related to the concourse from what I could tell.
Not really related, and a bit of a "woo" book, but there's a book called Latitude 33: Key to the Kingdom by Walter Bosley that suggests SRI designed the original Disney Land in a certain way to harness some sort of "woo" energy on the 33rd parallel. There's a bit in it though (I'm 99% its in this book) that involves some peculiar man appearing out of time and place enjoying the park. I hadn't thought of that book in years but this triggered that.
As a work of non-fiction it is dubious, but it's a fun read as a work of fiction.
Now, wholly unrelated, but also a fun dubious as non-fiction but fun as fiction book: The Vertical Plane by Ken Webster which alleges that for 2 years in the 1980s messages from the 16th century and the future would appear on the author's BBC Micro computer with some interaction.
If you think I, a mature, science-oriented man of substance, have any interest these "woo" books, you are 100% correct. Can't wait to read "Latitude 33".
Long ago I deep-dove into the Ken Webster but found it ultimately unsatisfying because it was unfalsifiable. But what a ride!
It's not the greatest book but it was one I do not regret posting. They covered it on the Mysterious Universe podcast years ago which put it on my radar. Same with The Vertical Plane although, fortunately for people now, it's been re-printed so you don't have to pay an obscene amount for a copy of VP like I did.
P.S. I dined at Club 33 many times and once managed to rent it, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Indiana Jones ride for a private party of about 50 people.
If you're interested in the history of Luna Park and Coney Island as a whole, I recommend checking out Defunctland's video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C5kxkBPhpE
Edit: Also, we need to hear more about this UFO book!
Hey, I didn’t expect to learn anything new about Coney Island but I was delightfully mistaken. Thanks for that link. Here’s a little more information about the old book I referred to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32337229
Sorry, took me a while to find the book. We're moving. It's called "Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon" (A History of Celestial Signs and Miracles), By Conrad Lycosthenes, published in 1557. It's full of crazy stuff, and like modern clickbait they recycle the same pictures many times throughout the book. There are pictures of people flayed open, chimeras, dragons, etc., with many other pictures portraying fairly mundane aspects of life accurately.
I know this isn't what you meant, but I was at a garage sale, and they had a stack of old books, one had a hollowed-out compartment in it that contained a "sex toy". I asked the proprietor of the garage sale where the books came from, and she said they were her fathers and he passed away and no one wanted them.
Once I stayed in an Airbnb owned by Karl Friederich Gauss' distant relatives in Brazil.
It was a very cozy cabin in the mountains around Rio and I was celebrating a two-year anniversary with my girlfriend. There were a few books arranged in a short rack, mostly teen stuff, but one aged book stood out. It was an English version of Gauss' Theory of the Motion of the Heavenly Bodies, apparently borrowed from an university library in the 1970s but never returned. Inside, I found two documents from 1969, a voter registration and an exam card. They belonged to a woman with a Brazilian first name and Gauss' surname. Later, I had to transfer money to the Airbnb host, and she also had Gauss as a surname.
I was pretty thrilled with the whole thing. My girlfriend was more entertained by the cabin's cat.
I once bought about a dozen Doctor Who paperbacks at a garage sale. This was probably 1995.
Half of them contained mysterious hand-written notes which related to "keys".
Cryptic sentences on each paper like, "The fifth key is hard to find, and has many chilly neighbors".
To this day, I have no idea what it was about. Maybe the books and notes are on a shelf at my parent's house somewhere, and I'll take another pass at it some day.
Which had 0 to do with any of the books, as I recall. I would swear there was more than 5 notes about keys as well. Guess I'll have to dig them up and find out.
I found an old sheep intestine condom in a 19th century engineering reference book. The pages where I found it had been water damaged, likely, I later learned, from the condom having been washed after use and put in the book to dry and then forgotten. Condoms were expensive at the time and frequently reused.
I think the strangest thing I've ever found in a book had to be in the University's Library (still upset that i gave away my second edition Mein Kampf, that's why you don't give an alcoholic an interesting book, they'll pawn it off in a second to make ends meet)
I found a book on Visual Basic, ironically that language is what I work in today as it's an older legacy application. This book was quite passé even for it's release, however it was a big mega-tome of information concerning version 4. The previous owner left a few notes in the margins where he would write odd musings, probably when he had them as he was studying the drab text (truly was the most boring book on the subject I've ever found) it was one of these that I found a strange comment. He detailed a woman's features, didn't come off as creepy, just kind of odd; long black hair, lovely soft brown eyes, fair skin, etc. followed by a comment to the effect of, "writing it down now, since she'll be gone." and that hit different. You could tell by how he was writing that he was quite emotional.
It's a moment that clearly communicates the the one who finds the note that he had lost that race, too bad, he seemed to really take to her.
A few years ago, at Goodwill, I found a lovely 1930s copy of Eve Curie's biography of her mother Marie Curie. The book had been well-preserved in a homemade mylar jacket. In the flyleaf were two inscriptions: one a woman's name with "Dr", dated in the 1970s; the other dated in the early 2000s with another woman's name, also a doctor. When I flipped through the pages, a "Congrats grad" card fell out. Dr. A was Dr B's mother and had given her this book from her own library upon Dr B's graduation from med school.
A few weeks back I took a book to a nearby Little Library. I hadn't opened the book since 1987, when I was in college, but held onto it for reasons.
Right before I dropped it off in exchange for another I wanted, I thumbed through for some unknown reason. Inside was a note from a girl I knew in high school, who I'd drifted apart from somewhat. It was agreeing to my plan to:
Have her move 2000 miles to where I was going to school.
Marry in 1990.
I'd not seen the note in 1987, nor any time after, nor heard from her ever again - she presumably put that note there in late-1986, right about when we ended it. Long story, she was in town.
I looked her up. She married someone in 1989, divorced, married another, divorced.
Still a looker. Yes, we messaged a bit on FB.
Oddly, we've both moved around the country a bit, and actually nearly bumped into each other. I interviewed at a place she was working in 2002. I live now, five states from there, but five miles from where she lived in the early 90s.
I moved a few years ago and decided to sell a lot of books. I scanned the bar codes for about 50 and tried to sell them on Amzn. For my technical books, I learned that not matter how valuable the books were to me, they were worthless. However, I had some really valuable gems. One was a thick book of old Japanese lithographs, the explicit kind called "shunga". I sincerely don't know how I came to possess this book, but I sold it for $250. Another was self published by an old friend about his experience in the Seattle of the late 60s, which sold for $500.
I have been fascinated with books for as long as I can remember. In the early seventies we were one of the only families that I knew of who had an encyclopedia set, and we had both World Book and Britannica. I loved looking through those pages and learning things about the world.
The first book that was ever mine, was an old copy of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, given to me by my grandfather, who, and I do not know why I remember this, had just taught me the meaning of the word diplomatic. I was in first grade.
My grandfather, who was a blue collar lineman for the university, was always coming home with books, both new and used. I inherited his collection when he passed away in the early nineties. I still-to-this-day find little notes written in the margins and sometimes newspaper clippings inserted in between the pages..just waiting to be found.
While not really strange, I did find a book with the signature of John Archibald Wheeler, the famous physicist and advisor of people like Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, Charles Misner, and others, on the inside cover at a Half Price Books.
I'm really happy I found that for some reason. He's one of my favorite scientists, and it just feels nice to have a book that he once had in his collection.
Although not really strange, I bought a copy of Green Mansions from a rural, and dingy, old used book store. Stuck deeply in the pages were a bunch of silver certificates of several denominations dating from the 1920s and 30s, through the 1950s. Face value well into the hundreds of dollars. Still have them. Turns out the book itself is a first edition from 1904. Still have it, too.
My Israeli friend went thru his Grandmother's books after her death. Found hundreds in 'old Shekels' among the pages. Saving against some disaster I imagine.
Except they were worthless - there was an amnesty for turning them in, that had expired decades ago.
My mom once told me (morbidly so i guess) that when she passes to flip through all the books and check all her cd cases. I guess that's where she keeps her emergency cash as well.
I have some old (1800's) student primers (textbooks) which I value for the doodles and illustrations past owners have done.
Perhaps the most fascinating is a drawing of an early steamship with smokestack and paddle wheels, but also masts for sails. This style of ship didn't exist for that long, and some student long ago must have seen them and been fascinated by them enough to make the drawing in the book.
At a garage sale, I bought a bagful of books, sight unseen, for a dollar. When I got it home and starting looking at what was there, I found a first edition of Edward Abbey's The Monkeywrench Gang. Inside the book was an envelope addressed to the original purchaser, I suppose. Inside that was a letter from Abbey, written in response to a letter the purchaser had sent him, thanking him for his kind words. I had the handwriting in the letter along with its signature authenticated. I now have it framed. Pretty cool!
As an Abbey fan, I'm turning green with envy here. I'm still hoping to someday read Jonathan Troy without going to the considerable expense of buying it, not least because Abbey himself thought it was crap. Maybe I should buy more random bags of goodwill books...
The wonderful book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki contains a page which is blank except for a drawing of a fly in one corner. Nowhere else in the book is it mentioned or any explanation provided. Having practiced Zen for 10 years, I have an idea that might explain it. But on the surface, it is completely strange and inexplicable.
Once in a while, I see a cluster of books in a Goodwill or Salvation Army that are very niche. Like, 20 books on flyfishing among 200 books. I bet the most interesting people to meet have odd collections of books.
Those can be very valuable. I have a little library of Victorian angling books that someone will donate similarly, yet cost several hundreds to accumulate. As the saying goes: "pray your wife doesn't sell it for what you told her you paid for it"
As I've got older though I'm starting to realize I don't care what my wife sells my stuff for after I'm gone. What I care about is she sells it to someone who wants it. I want my stuff sold to some collectors who will appreciate it, and not the scrap dealer. If the collector gets it for less than the scrap dealer will pay that would be fine with me. (and I think I'll leave my wife enough that she can afford to give it away like that)
I thought that saying was about a fellow's workshop tools? (not me, honest luv...) However, anyone who's dealt in rare/collectable/used ANYTHING has also run into the opposite problem: when someone's sure what they inherited is super valuable, and it's really not. Worse when it goes to waste because they want thousands for it and nobody sane will pay that, then they dump it out of spite. I probably ought to leave a note in the safe about which of my own things are worth appraising (not many) and which not to bother (99%).
My wife's artist friend loaned us a beautiful old book about a famous restaurant and it's menus - Del Monicos. It was handsomely illustrated. Including the feast for Lincoln's inauguration dinner etc.
Original binding but for some added librarians' tape to keep the covers stable. She paid $6 at a thrift shop.
I googled a bit - worth $400 to $600! She doesn't care; its all about the beautiful illustrations for her.
A book I found in a design store in Helsinki consisted of an entire novel (one of Dickens’, I think) that had been sorted, word by word, into alphabetical order. For example, all the “the’s” were grouped together.
I guess the artist who made it was trying to say something, but I couldn’t tell what. Order matters? Books are a fraud? Maybe the punchline for a joke, “here is the book you ordered! Get it? Ordered!”
I have an interest in medical books from the first half of the 20th Century. It's fascinating what you can find, even in books that have been passed through many sets of hands.
In one, I found a stockbrocker's letter and managed to trace the owner to his historic pubmed articles (all > 100 years old), as well as obituaries and probable descendants on WikiTree.
I once found, in a second hand birding book (Collins Guide / Fågelguiden), a "congratulations to your degree"-card with an embossed crown on it, signed by Frida + Ruzzo. Some additional details lead me to the conclusion it was written by Anni-Frid Lyngstad of ABBA. (Ruzzo was Frida's late husband, who was prince of House of Reuss)
When Aldrich Ames, the notorious CIA KGB double-agent was sent to prison, his personal library ended up in a used bookstore in the DC area and I picked up a few volumes that had his name stamped on the inside.
A postcard from about 100 years ago, a woman was greeting her friend about how nice it to have annual leave during summer, basically bragging about it, found it in a book that I bought at the thrift store.
When I was in grade school in the 70's, I bought a used book with my allowance. It had a pristine $100 bill in it, presumably used for a bookmark. I think I paid $2 for it or something. Needless to say, I had never seen $100 before. I was filthy rich! I still remember the shock and joy.
I bought a used book on mountain climbing and inside were two business cards: one for a security specialist out of Whiteman Air Force Base who worked for the 509 Bomb Wing (which flies B-2 Stealth bombers) and the other for the director of a forensic lab which does homicide crime scene investigation for a county Office of the Prosecutor in New Jersey. I always thought there was a story there connecting the two but there were no other clues save the hand-written name of a person from Venice, FL, on the back of one.
Wow! What a beautiful story! Thank you for sharing this. On a side note, this is the kind of stuff I love about blogs, people sharing the nice, unexpected and serendipitous moments of life.
In 10th grade I wasn't sure I could register to a chemistry with one teacher so I didn't. But when school started, the teacher who was supposed to teach the class was different and accepted me into the class. However, I didn't anticipate needing the textbook, so she sent me back to the class library where there was some hard-worn copies of various classbooks. I was in luck that the book she wanted me to have was there, but it was really, really worn out, and written all over. But beggars can't be choosers, so I took what was there for me.
Well, going through the class I've discovered that all the writing on the margins was actually incredibly useful! I followed them whenever I could, and when we were doing routine chemistry experiments measuring pH of acids and playing with precipitation, my experiments miraculously came up with new varieties of teflon coating! While everyone else's salt crystals looked boring, I was able to grow fabulous Bismuth crystals. My class mates grew suspicious of my prowess since previously I showed no aptitude to chemistry. After an altercation with one of other jealous students, I realized that I had to hide the book somewhere safe, and it is likely still sitting in the back closet of the school's cafeteria waiting for next lucky student.
Yesterday heard an NPR story on a similar topic - A librarian collects all the things left in books — from love letters to old photos -- https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1114851706
The WaPo article - Librarian finds love notes, doodles in books and shares them with a grateful public -- https://wapo.st/3SjGKNv
I bought a used copy of A Discipline for Software Engineering by Watts S. Humphrey, and when I received it, I found that it had been signed by the author as a gift to his brother, Philip S. Humphrey.
The inscription reads: "Phil - here's the latest opus - Watts"
Apparently the lyrics to Sheryl Crow's "All I wanna do" song were taken from a poetry book found in a second hand book store.
After the song hit, the poet got sued by the person he'd based the character of Bill on.
> The lyrics of the song are based on the poem "Fun" by Wyn Cooper.[1][2][3][4] Cooper was inspired to write the poem by a conversation at a bar with a friend and occasional writer, Bill Ripley,[5][6] in which he said "All I want is to have a little fun before I die", which became the first line of the poem. In a 1994 interview, Cooper said: "The poem isn't really about him. Or me. They're different people. They're people you can sort of see as ... well ... objective correlatives. Symbols of people like us, or what we could have been, or what we would have become if we continued to drink and do nothing with our lives."[7][8]
> Toad Hall Studio, where the song was recorded, was next door to the Pasadena Playhouse.[9][10] Crow's producer (Bottrell) discovered Cooper's poetry book The Country of Here Below in a nearby used bookstore in Pasadena, California. Crow had written a song called "I Still Love You" but was unhappy with its lyrics; she used its melody and adapted the poem for her lyrics to "All I Wanna Do".
> The song earned Cooper considerable royalties and helped to promote his book, originally published in a run of only 500 copies in 1987, into multiple reprints.[7] After the song became popular, Ripley brought an unsuccessful lawsuit against Cooper for some of the song's royalties, which ended their friendship.[7][11]
I can't believe you posted that - just yesterday I was thinking about how dark that song was.
The bit that really stood out was how "anti-Billy" it was: "He says his name is William, but I'm sure it's Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy". Like he was lying about his name/nickname. Then later - even when siding with him - says "They're nothing like Billy and me". He bloody told you his name was William!
The more I thought about the song the more I thought that the lyrics made a really interesting poem.
Latin for Lawyers 2nd edition
seems to be based on E. Hilton Jackson ( a lawyer) & Broom's Legal Maxims
published 1937, sweet & maxwell
(Book was from ebay, unread condition)
Pasted inside front cover -
This book is a typical text excercise book from the years between the two world wars!
It is almost useless in imparting any understanding of the subject. Almost all books on any subject tended to be like this and students often had to battle to make sense of incomprehendible texts. Even with the help of of a tutor it is difficult to see how anyone could follow it.
Anyone trying to use it alone would entirely be lost and confused.
There is no account of how to use it, no help with following the numbering system, and above all no ANSWERS!
Even someone with a school grounding in Latin would have difficulty.
It is a fine example of the dry, pedantic and often unhelpful attitude of the time in the teaching profession where simple facts were often presented in an unnecessarily convoluted way, simply it seems because this was the academic fashion
This habit only died out after WWII
It has a parallel in the Victorian.habit of giving quite ordinary toys elaborate Greek names, such as the Phenakistoscope!
Not exactly strange, but found something quite depressing.
A second hand book that I bought 5 years back had a medical bill with multiple cancer medications listed.
The bill had the age and name of the patient - a man in his 20s.
To me, it felt like he'd sold the book to cover his medical expenses.
Every time I pick that book up I get reminded of that bill, and haven't been able to finish the book as yet.
I worked in a room next to a public library in the late 2000s and since the work was not that demmanding, I had plenty of time to read and explore the library. Someday I found a room full of old books that were not catalogued, it was a donation from the family of the town`s main doctor that had recently died. I spent a few weeks exploring his collection and when I went into a science fiction book, I dont remember exactly but I think it was Arthur C Clarke Profiles of the Future, I found a receipt dating beginning 60`s, it was a receipt from an airplane company. The doctor had been the mayor in that time and had paid the company just to have a plane flying low over the town.
I could never exactly figure out his motivations but I like to think that there was some sort of commemoration going on in town and he hired the flight just to have people know what a plane was like. It happened in a very rural area of Brazil, in a town that by time that had not more than 1000 habitants, no television, no paved roads, almost nothing.
Which is also a very strange and interesting book, but inside of it, bought from a thrift store, I found a pressed Marijuana leaf, which I still have. I would have thought that they would at least riffle the pages of the books to make sure there was no money or anything in it but somehow this leaf slipped through.
Great article. I laughed when the card for the dentist fell out of the book, because I also use them as bookmarks.
The strangest thing I ever found in a book wasn’t so much a physical item, it was more of a synchronicity of sorts.
During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, after a jury acquitted the police of beating Rodney King, San Francisco experienced a smaller riot that lasted for six hours or so, resulting in the selected looting of downtown, and the then mayor imposing a curfew and limiting movement for the night.
I remember that I had picked up a copy of Nathanael West's novel "The Day of the Locust" (1939) about a week before the riots. I was downtown when the riots broke out, and I had just gotten to the end of the book when the riots occurred in the story just as they were happening all around me.
If you think that’s strange, it gets even stranger. In the book, the riots occur in Los Angeles during a film premiere and the narrator is surprised because it reminds him of a painting he made titled "The Burning of Los Angeles".
Offtopic: your account reminded me of a funny event from a few years back.
I'd arranged with a friend to watch a movie, 28 Weeks Later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later). We picked a cinema in London's Canary Wharf area, not realizing that the movie was actually set there!
Spoiler: in the movie, Canary Wharf is utterly destroyed by firebombing.
When we emerged from the movie, we walked around in a daze, through areas that we'd seen obliterated just a short while earlier.
In a book I found at Goodwill back in 94/95 there was a 8x10 photo of an orangutan sitting alone in a metal cage. It wasn't a part of a book and the book wasn't about apes or zoos or anything related, it was just a random photo someone had stuck in there. I asked how much for the photo, and they gave it to me. I still have it in a box in my office.
I love this story, and imagine that I would enjoy experiencing that. I'm skeptical that I'm even allowing something like that to happen, let alone being proactive about trying to make it happen.
In high school I used to work at a library in Columbia, MD, just checking in/out books, shelving them, etc. Columbia happens to be very close to the NSA headquarters, and more than once I've found people use classified documents (once even an SSH login / password for some server).
I once found a love poem hidden between the pages of a German dictionary. It was written by grandfather and dedicated to grandmother. He commited suicide in the 1970's and grandmother never knew about this poem, so to her it was like a little message from him years later.
Strangest thing I ever found in a book was a unexpired unused sealed condom pack in a religious book in a hotel nightstand; normally search my hotel rooms to make sure there no obvious things that shouldn’t be there, were mistakenly left, etc.
I enjoy buying used books partly for the random items and marks. It's surprising how many old books include scribbled notes or underlined/highlighted sections. Sometimes the notations make sense, but often times I have no idea why a certain part was highlighted and have fun trying to figure out the connection between various marked passages.
The most common item I've found is a receipt. Sometimes it will be for the book itself; often it will be totally unrelated, sometimes quite old.
There is something enjoyable about having these little connections to a distant stranger as part of an otherwise solitary activity.
This is something I left in a book. I keep Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment on my desk, more out of nostalgia than anything. I flipped through it one day and found the receipt ($56!) from when I bought it, in 1995, at a Barnes and Noble in a strip mall outside Cincinnati. I bought it on the way home from my summer job. I had to implement a simple database, and browsing the stacks it looked like the best option. I learned so much from it, but not about databases! There are still sticky notes on all of the sections about file descriptors.
Bought a book at a lovely 2nd-hand bookstore in Utrecht, Netherlands - reading it weeks later I noticed there was a 1.5 inch wooden-wedge jammed tight into the gutter. It's still there.
A friend of mine once had the idea to create a zine where the contents were made up of things that we'd find in between the pages of books at Goodwill.
We went to a few different Goodwills around town, and while the idea was exciting- it turned dark quickly when we discovered the research notes of a man who had been diagnosed with cancer. It appeared he was not going to win the battle, and he knew it. Perhaps this was his way of coping, but from the state of the medial book it appeared he did not win the battle. I don't think the zine was ever published.
A few years ago I got some books for free from a second-hand bookstore here in Zagreb, Croatia, where I live. One of those was a Real World OCaml book with a dedication from Jane Street Team to someone named Gustav. There were also some other books about functional programming given for free. I guess Gustav decided functional progamming wasn't for him, and just dumped those books to the first bookstore he could find.
Also, a few years back, I borrowed The Agebraist by Iain M. Banks from a local library and found his signature in there on the title page.
As a teen, it was incredibly exciting to find a VA prescription blank dated 1940s in a first edition of Otto Fenichel's The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis that I picked up at a thrift store.
I found a $100 treasury bill in a Goodwill book a few years ago. It had some lady’s SS number and address on it. Date was 1973, so $100 was not a small deal.
Hand writing in books is super underrated. Underlining, summarizations, etc. are all really useful. I love when I have an old technical book that has a passage I can’t understand and then some stranger from years ago who did figure out what the author was conveying explains it in their own words in the margin.
Write notes in the books you own and buy books that have notes in them.
In the late 2000s, inside a university library copy of the 2003 edition of the Clocksin and Mellish book Programming in Prolog I found a print-out (dot-matrix, by the look of it) of an email sent in 1988 from one of the authors of the book to the other, regarding how to revise it for a future edition.
We used to visit a village in Pakistan because my dad's family lived there. I hated going there because it was a village and really boring with nothing to do there. One day (as a ten year old) I decided to go snooping at my uncle's house because I was extremely bored. While going through some pantry closets I found a Thor comic book! In a village in Pakistan! We're talking about the late 1970s. That was my first introduction to comic books!
There's a lot of people you can randomly encounter, especially on the internet, if you're curious enough to wander around in the vast series of tubes. I always go around like a creep clicking on various links, finding people's websites and profiles, and joining their groups or sending them a message. A lot of interesting people that I've even made friends with, I have encountered this way, and I have many tales to tell.
This happened to me once, but it was a beetle and it flew out of a sealed package of spinach from the grocery store. They doubled my refund which was nice.
Last year I bought a copy of The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, first edition. Inside was a folded piece of paper printed in really coarse old dot-matrix that had
(I
(BE
(NOT
(RATHER
(WOULD))))
(PROGRAMMING
(LISP IN)))
If only they'd stuck with it until evaluation order was introduced.
When I lived in Brooklyn, folks in my neighborhood would often leave out things that they wanted to give away. I picked up a poetry book one day from the sidewalk and started thumbing through it on my walk home. One of the first pages had a handwritten note. The book apparently had been a gift, and the giver wrote a note to the giftee that began, "My dear fellow cannibal, ..."
A bar I frequented had books on every shelf on every wall. When visiting I usually wouldn't touch them, but once in awhile after a beverage I'd grab a random one and peek inside.
One I opened had on the inside cover someone's full name and social security number.
I brought it up to the bartender so they could rip out that page and throw it away.
Was there a time when putting your SSN inside a book was common?
When I went to college (graduated 1999) our SSN was our student ID. Professors used to publicly post our names, SSN, and grade on the bulletin board after exams.
Nitpicky point here, but that's not localhost - localhost is typically 127.0.0.1 (although the entire /8 is reserved for loopback use, this is the only address defined in a typical hosts file).
When I was a college student I loved reading older books from the library because, for a time, whoever donated the book could write an inscription on the front matter. The inscriptions varied. Some were about the book. Some were about personal experiences at my college. Sometimes you’d even find doodles or poems.
Since everyone's talking about textbooks: I thought I'd save money buying the "international edition", since it seemed to have all the same information.
I had homework assignments that required analyzing color-coded diagrams in the book. Except the international edition was printed in black and white!
My favourite graffito of all time was a marginalia note in a book of Jane Jacobs, from my uni library, following some comment or another she'd made regarding architecture and/or urban planning:
"God bless you, Jane!"
I couldn't have agreed more, and found the defacement entirely justified.
The older actress in this is Marsha Hunt, a remarkable woman. She was 89 in this short. She's still alive today, 104, living in a house she's owned since 1946.
I went through a phase of reading plays, usually collected in used paperback books. In one of them I found a receipt from a florist. It was made out to a well-known comic book writer and was for flowers he sent to his mother. Unexpected and wholesome.
I went to the Orlando Public Library once, science section. Saw a book titled, "Combustion." I open the pages to take a look which unveils pieces of weed pressed between the pages. I wonder just how long that had been sitting there.
In a book bought on Amazon I found a 50 dollars check as a gift. Unfortunately the book was coming from US and I can't use the check in Europe. But it still fun to receive it and I have kept it in my drawer
I was reading a book about time travel a few years ago that had randomly caught my attention. In the story they traveled to the exact date and time that I was reading the book. It was quite surreal.
An invitation to a secret society gathering that somebody seemingly should have picked up decades earlier. The book was a dead drop and apparently nobody had picked up that book in a long, long time.
No, really. Estate sale, found an interesting pile of novels. Got home, a letter drops out of one from Pope John Paul to a friend. They were using it as a bookmark. Very odd.
I paid one $US dollar for a book at a yard sale and later found a 20 euro note inside. I'll never spend it ( not in EU ) but it was a nice surprise since I'd never seen one.
I bought an old book at a used book store and I found the receipt for the original book purchase inside. The receipt had the buyer's name and credit card number clearly printed.
What was truly won at that auction was a priceless friendship and the ability for someone to pass down some of their prized books to their grandchildren. Amazing.
Back in 94/95 at Goodwill I was thumbing through some random book and there was a 8x10 photo of an orangutan sitting alone in a metal cage. It wasn't a part of a book and the book wasn't about apes or zoos or anything related, it was just a random photo someone had stuck in there. I asked how much for the photo, and they gave it to me. I still have it in a box in my office.
IME it's pretty common to find stuff like this (photos, receipts, napkins, etc.) used as impromptu bookmark and "swallowed" at some point so not obvious it's there.
In a used copy of William Kent’s Data and Reality, I found a 3x5” index card with a handwritten note in blue highlighter. On one side, “It’s who you know, not what you can do.” On the back, “Listen to your fucking conscience.” I always wonder what the story was there. It didn’t feel like a note to self; perhaps a warning for young programmers?
reminds me, in the mid 80s, of my friend and I who made a lot of gun powder when we were young, we pretty much got all the things we needed out of the encyclopedia. The potassium nitrate was easily available, in bulk, at the garden store, as well as Sulphur. We'd use lumps of charcoal on sandpaper and got a fantastically fine powder. We made various kinds of fireworks, then we started putting it in pipes and folding the ends over and we started getting "booms". We kept doing this until we made things that we started getting too scare to set off. We had quite a few close calls where pieces of shrapnel went wizzing by. We did this in my backyard, it was odd my parents were kind of ok with this (up until a point....) my dad who was a research physicist worked at a large scientific institute and must of talking to his friends at work about our adventures, and someone there gave him all these old chemicals, metals, and all kinds to take home. Things like magnesium which makes for great fireworks like things. Some iodine, which we turned into a super shock sensitive explosive (by mixing it with ammonia). Then there was a can of sodium pellets. Our experience with sodium had been what we had seen in class, you put a bit in water, and you get this pretty good fizz/fire reaction. Sort of was expecting this, these pellets were much bigger than anything we'd seen been put in water, so we just popped one in a bucket of water expecting a massive fizzing and buzzing around of the pellet..... but ..... nope, it did a bit of fizzing for half a second before it exploded sending burning sodium all over the back yard....luckily it didn't set anything on fire, but my parents weren't at impressed at this experiment and banned all further experiments. Now looking back on it, I just keep thinking... WHAT THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS THINKING?
In an introductory Russian book, a note in Russian that had been left by a cleaner in a hotel room, who was delighted to see that someone was studying Russian.
In a German book, some tickets to a movie theater, and a clipping about the more or less covert revival of university dueling societies in the 1950s.
Lots of older pulp paperbacks have a couple glossy pages of ads in the middle (usually bound-in, though, not loose) and more often than not, they're cigarette ads.
Can confirm the ebook lacks any ads for Newport Reds (which might have gone well with Wrath of the Red Lady immediately before), or any other cigarettes
My favorite grad student bar is "The Library". The walls are lined with books. If you know the right two books you can find decks of vintage porn playing cards. Not that soft stuff either, these would make sailors blush.
A french newspaper clipping from 1907 - the book documented some museum's collection and the newspaper article was very tangentially related, but the museum was in the UK and didn't have anything french in it.
I do enjoy finding marginalia in used booked and have started doing it myself. I know some people think marking up books is sacrilege, but this is only mass-market paperbacks.
I do enjoy finding marginalia in used booked and have started doing it myself. I know some people think marking up books is sacrilege, but this is only mass-market paperbacks.
I borrowed a book from a teacher's book shelf in high school and it had notes about her plans to divorce her husband along with her reasons for doing so.
Our family had these 1880 catechism books since forever. In the back cover there was a letter written in old Lithuanian about running away from war (1945).
In grad school, I checked a book out of the library and found an envelope for a congratulations card with something like $50 in it in various small bills. I felt bad because it seemed like it was a collection for a gift or something but there was no name on it. But I didn't feel so bad that I went to see if the library could tell me who checked the book out before me...
Or some kind of hidden paper tucked away inside, left there for some now-unknown purpose, hidden and dormant for 19 years in a dusty attic in upstate New York, only later retrieved by Frans Bortenharfer?
in college I retrieved a copy of waiting for godot from the bowels of main stacks at the recommendation of my girlfriend and found a note on the jacket from another person of the same name (an uncommon one at that) who had recommended it to her beau.
I used the bookmarklet, and it's plausible that I was, at the time, viewing the blog root page (as linked here) rather than drilling down to the permalink.
