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July 23, 2009

The beauty of second hand books: junk

Try finding someone’s old shopping lists or used hanky in your recently purchased (and ganked) Kindle tome. Well, when you put it that way…

In the window of a secondhand bookshop in North London hangs, among other things, a chest x-ray, an air freight invoice and the handwritten guest list to a party, complete with notes for the host’s speech. Inside the shop, about a dozen photo albums containing family holiday snaps, wedding day memories, pictures of pets and more are laid out on a table for customers to browse through.

They may well recognise some of the items. All have been accidentally sent to the shop in boxes of donated books, many of them stuck between pages as makeshift bookmarks by previous owners. All these articles are on display to give people a chance to see them, and claim them back. The shop’s manager tells me that so far only one, a photograph of a cat, has returned home.

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3 comments on “The beauty of second hand books: junk”

  1. Dave says:

    Can’t say I’ve ever had any of the interesting items such as those in my second hand books. The most thrilling thing I’ve come across is an inscription saying “To the woman I love, here’s a show of my affection on this, the most precious of days…” Let’s hope the relationship lasted longer than the original ownership of the book.

  2. Citizen Reader says:

    Proving once again that bookstores are better to work in than libraries: all I ever found in books returned to our library were kleenexes, bandaids, cat urine, and, on one memorable occasion, what turned out to be vomit. (We called to ask what the substance was. “Oh, yeah, my grandma vomited in the book. Is it damaged?”) To make up for all of that, the one time we found a fifty-dollar-bill that someone was using as a bookmark, I wanted to keep it, but I was outvoted.

  3. Monica says:

    i ran into this (click the link) on Corey Redekop’s blog, Shelf Monkey.

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