You marked your place with WHAT?!
AbeBooks reports on some of the odd items that purveyors of used books find inside their wares, many presumably having been used as bookmarks. In addition to a wide variety of currency, these items include rare baseball cards, diamond rings, baby teeth, and a strip of bacon.
As for me, I'm pretty mundane. I typically use the receipt I got when purchasing the book, or a mental note about which chapter/page number I was on.
Hat tip to LIS News.
2 comments:
In my former life I worked in the textbook department of a university bookstore at a fairly large northeastern school. We found all sorts of interesting things in the used textbooks. Most of what we found in textbooks purchased from wholesalers were original purchase receipts and bookmarks from other schools.
We found a lot more in the books our own students sold, all of which we attached to our manager's office door. When the door filled up after a few years, someone pulled it all down and pasted the items into a notebook for posterity and we started again.
The most popular items were photos. One of the first photos that went on the door was of a woman with three cadets. A couple of years after it went up, one of the people in the picture was in the store and saw it. He was a senior and told us it was from his freshman year. It was taken at a holiday party, I think. A couple of semesters later, we found several photos that appeared to be from a frat party. They were mostly of obviously drunk people. At least one of the people so pictured came in the store in a later semester to buy her books.
Other fun things we found included a dollar (laminated to keep people from stealing it off the door), tests and papers and a breakup note.
Diamond rings? Good grief! I could think of other things to do with those than to use them as book marks...like, cash them in and get a full tank of gas for once.
I just dog ear my books. It's cheaper.
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