I was catching up on The Chronicle : Wired Campus in my feed reader and found a reference to an article on the AbeBooks.Com site called “Found in Books“.

“Be careful what you use as a bookmark. Thousands of dollars, a Christmas card signed by Frank Baum, a Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card, a marriage certificate from 1879, a baby’s tooth, a diamond ring and a handwritten poem by Irish writer Katharine Tynan Hickson are just some of the stranger objects discovered inside books by AbeBooks.com booksellers.”

There’s an interesting story in a comment on the Chronicle’s article, “Found in old books, June 11 2008″.

“When I attended the same Univ that my Dad had 30 years earlier, he told me to go check out his dissertation. I did and found a $10 bill inside! I called him and told him. He had forgotten that — when he had recently earned his doctorate — he had placed that bill in the library’s copy of his dissertation, just to see if anyone ever read those things. 30 years later, it was still in there. I initialed it, replaced it, and returned the book.”

The only remarkable thing I can actually remember finding in a book was a  AU $50 note many years back when I worked in the Albert Shire Library Service (now part of the Gold Coast). There was also an occasional squashed fly or mosquito, and plenty of sand - a hazard for all libraries located near the beach.

Read the article on the AbeBooks site for much more interesting finds than mine, and take a look at the photo pool on Flickr for “Things found in Books“.  Some second-hand bookstores and libraries have set up displays of things they find in books, so why not do the same thing online in Flickr.  I’d love to see some of the quirkier finds on Flickr, and what books they were found in.  How about a campaign to grow the pool on Flickr?

I couldn’t find any in the pool with a creative commons license to show here, so please consider using a CC licence if you contribute.

Image used here is by DG Jones, reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.