A Thousand Stories
Today, I was driving the long drive to my chiropractor's office, and I started wondering if the 'raw bacon bookmark' really happened or not.
Three times in the ten years that I've worked at the Library, I've heard the story about the library book that was returned with raw bacon in it used as a bookmark.
I have personally removed hundreds of ersatz bookmarks from library books. Most are torn scraps of paper. Some are school photos of children, or pamphlets, or ribbons, or twist ties. When I worked at the library at a small Catholic college, a significant proportion of the bookmarks there were prayer cards or pope/bishop collector cards. This isn't a bookmark story - to digress for a moment - but one book came back at that same library once with bullet holes right through it (a book on capital punishment, no less).
So paper, twist ties, post-its, strings - but raw bacon? What do you think, is it true? What is the best thing you have ever found in a book?
8 Comments:
Gwen,
There's an old story that my husband told about a fellow grad student who put a $20.00 bill in his dissertation and then would go check the shelves to see if it had been read.
We're about to do a weeding project, and I know from the last time we did that I'll need to take out a lot of post-it-notes and paperclips that didn't get pulled when the book was returned. I always enjoy reading the notes.
Micaela (yup, still with you from Steven's blogging class almost 2 years ago)
Gwen,
I don't think this qualifies as the "best" thing found in a book..but it certainly caused the most comments...we found a photograph of a nude man in a full-frontal (no face-chest to knee) pose in a photography book...jm
Hey Micaela! Glad to see you're still around! I wonder how many of us are. Good story about the grad student; it must be painful to imagine writing a thesis that never gets opened - I might put money in it too, if that were me!
I was processing donations in tech. serv. once, when a MasterCard fell out of a book. When I told my supervisor what I had found she said, "How did one of our master file cards get into a donation?", to which I replied, "No, a MasterCard, as in, 'cha-ching'!" The cards was brand new, unsigned and the cardholder was deceased...ooooh the things I could have done with that card! If only I weren't such a rule-follower.
I remember finding a flat wind-up whirly-gig sitting inside a book about phobias. When the book was opened out it popped; whirling and gigging. Can't imagine what effect this might have had on someone suffering from a phobia!
Gwen,
Yeah, I'm a faithful reader, and have loved watching Sprout grow up, reading your library stories, and envying your home remodeling/ bookshelf building/etc. projects.
I'm still writing at http://livelibrary.blogspot.com/
but it's pretty simple stuff, and gets read mostly by my staff and a few faculty. So I'm pretty conservative in it, trying to stay under the radar of the campus PR folks, who might try to develop a policy or something.
But I'm glad I took the course, it was so cool to be on the leading edge of something for a while.
Spring break here, so I'm catching up on my bloglines, and actually responding to a few, like yours. Keep it up, it warms my heart!
Why, just today I found a $5 bill in Sports: The Complete Visual Reference. A misplaced bet? Anyway, right or wrong, I'm going to keep it, and I'm going to spend it all in one place, and that place is Winston's. See you there, Gwen.
T.
The real question should be: if you found a piece of bacon in a book, would you eat it?
Post a Comment
<< Home