The E-Sylum:  Volume 7, Number 26, June 28, 2004, Article 18

THINGS FOUND IN OLD BOOKS

  Addressing a subject we've touched on before in The E-Sylum,
  the June 22 Wall Street Journal had an interesting article about
  the odd and curious things used book sellers find inside the
  pages of their merchandise:

  "A book is a good place to stash personal, valuable,
  embarrassing stuff.  Unless, forgetting all about the stuff, you
  sell the book to a used book store.

  "I'd always have a book with me when I got arrested," said
  Richard Ryan on being told that his 1985 rap sheet had fallen
  out of a book at the Strand, a store on Broadway in Manhattan
  where anybody can flip through a heap of two million volumes.
  "Books end up as filing cabinets," Mr. Ryan says, remembering
  his days as a student apartheid protester. "I'm sure I got my
  arrest ticket and filed it in the book."

  "At the Strand's main desk, Richard Lilly said, "Let this be a
  warning to those who don't look through books before they
  sell. Bored clerks see it all."

  "Yesterday, I found this really cool picture of this naked
  wrestler guy," Ms. Thompson says. In the fiction department,
  Ben McFall says: "I have a collection at home, which I can't
  bring in, of men in negligees. How do these things get away
  from people?"

  "Used books often gain value from forgotten paper -- paper
  money, for example; the Strand's staff rakes in lots of that.
  They haven't yet found a "hell scene with fish monster," as
  Cristiana Romelli did two years ago at Sotheby's in London.
  The original Hieronymus Bosch sketch fell out of a client's
  old picture album and sold for $276,000. A few years earlier,
  her colleague Julien Stock found a Michelangelo stuck in a
  19th-century scrap book.  In 2001, that one brought its
  owner $12 million.

  The Strand did buy a $15 doodled-over book of drawings
  by the Renaissance artist Ucello.  The doodler was Salvador
  Dali."

  [So, dear readers, what interesting things have you happened to
  find in purchases of numismatic literature?  -Editor]

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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