WSJ.com – At Used-Book Stores, Unintended Mysteries Are Often the Best describes a surprisingly common scenario:
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.
For instance, Richard Ryan, a former student protester, left his rap sheet in a book he sold to the Strand, New York’s oldest and biggest independent used-book seller.
Some more examples:
Erin Thompson, who enters new buys into the Strand’s computer, found a key in a book and wears it on a string around her neck. Ephemera drift up on her desk: the Louths’ hand-drawn family tree. An ink sketch dated 1901 — hidden in a 1969 Christmas card — of a horse pulling a plow. A doctor’s prescription pad with the following notations: “Wednesday — mambo, lindy, spins. Thursday — rumba or tango. At work — angry. Really got angry. How to use?”
Imagine finding this:
Adam Davis, a 25-year-old from Oregon, took a job as a Strand clerk when he came to New York three years ago to write fiction. One day, he opened a copy of Barbara Tuchman’s medieval history, “A Distant Mirror,” and discovered a birth certificate. The baby’s father was listed as “not known.” An attached rider, dated years later, named the father.Wrapped inside the certificate was a snapshot of a woman posing nude in a motel room, and one, in black-and-white, of what appeared to be the same woman as a child. There were some traveler’s-check receipts, and the stub of a train ticket, issued shortly after the date on the rider, for a trip to the town where the birth certificate was issued.
Maybe I should take a job at a used-book store:
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. Fred Bass, the Strand’s owner, once opened a book titled “The Bill of Rights” to find it was hollowed out. The bottom of the inside was signed, “Boo! Abbie Hoffman.” Mr. Bass says he learned later from Mr. Hoffman that he had hidden a tape recorder in there during the Chicago Seven trial.