WHAT HAVE YOU FOUND IN OLD BOOKS?

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V21 2018 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 21, Number 6, February 11, 2018, Article 23

WHEN LORRAINE SMITH FOUND A mysterious manuscript in a used copy of Alice in Wonderland, her discovery sent her on a hunt to uncover the document’s origins. She’d owned and operated a used book shop for 17 years, and never before had one of her titles contained anything like this piece of parchment from 1583.

After we published Smith’s story, Atlas Obscura readers started sharing unexpected discoveries inside used books that they’d made themselves. One reader found a soldier’s records from the Boer War inside a volume of Alexander Pope’s collected letters. Another reported finding a 20-year-old email, printed out, that one of the book’s authors had sent to the other. One reader even found “a small slip of paper,” which turned out to be “a receipt for the purchase of milk from Offin Boardman—dated April 4, 1776.”

We love these stories, and want to hear more. Please tell us: What’s the best or most unexpected treasure you’ve ever discovered hiding in a book?

We've discussed this topic before, but it's been some time. People slip all sorts of things in the pages of their books, and these can be forgotten until the book is sold off and some future reader makes a discovery. So... what goodies, numismatic or otherwise, have you found in the pages of an old book? Here's one such find mentioned in an earlier E-Sylum issue. -Editor

[Saint-Gaudens’ son Homer was associated with the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. I recall a story told by Glenn Mooney, one of the local volunteer curators who worked alongside head curator W.W. Woodside. Glenn said that Homer had arranged to donate an extremely high relief double eagle to the Museum’s collection. For a time the coin was misplaced and no one could locate it. Eventually it turned up in the reference library – someone (probably Woodside himself) had accidentally closed a reference book with the coin inside. It was an embarrassing lapse, but everyone got a chuckle out of it at Woodside’s expense. I assume this coin was part of the holdings sold when the Museum dispersed the bulk of the collection in the late 70s/early 80s. With these coins selling now in the multi-millions, it would have made for an interesting find in the stacks of the library (the coin department’s reference library was transferred to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in the early 80s). -Editor]