I used the bookmarklet, and it's plausible that I was, at the time, viewing the blog root page (as linked here) rather than drilling down to the permalink.
I love this story, and imagine that I would enjoy experiencing that. I'm skeptical that I'm even allowing something like that to happen, let alone being proactive about trying to make it happen.
Once in a while, I see a cluster of books in a Goodwill or Salvation Army that are very niche. Like, 20 books on flyfishing among 200 books. I bet the most interesting people to meet have odd collections of books.
Those can be very valuable. I have a little library of Victorian angling books that someone will donate similarly, yet cost several hundreds to accumulate. As the saying goes: "pray your wife doesn't sell it for what you told her you paid for it"
As I've got older though I'm starting to realize I don't care what my wife sells my stuff for after I'm gone. What I care about is she sells it to someone who wants it. I want my stuff sold to some collectors who will appreciate it, and not the scrap dealer. If the collector gets it for less than the scrap dealer will pay that would be fine with me. (and I think I'll leave my wife enough that she can afford to give it away like that)
I thought that saying was about a fellow's workshop tools? (not me, honest luv...) However, anyone who's dealt in rare/collectable/used ANYTHING has also run into the opposite problem: when someone's sure what they inherited is super valuable, and it's really not. Worse when it goes to waste because they want thousands for it and nobody sane will pay that, then they dump it out of spite. I probably ought to leave a note in the safe about which of my own things are worth appraising (not many) and which not to bother (99%).
I once bought about a dozen Doctor Who paperbacks at a garage sale. This was probably 1995.
Half of them contained mysterious hand-written notes which related to "keys".
Cryptic sentences on each paper like, "The fifth key is hard to find, and has many chilly neighbors".
To this day, I have no idea what it was about. Maybe the books and notes are on a shelf at my parent's house somewhere, and I'll take another pass at it some day.
Which had 0 to do with any of the books, as I recall. I would swear there was more than 5 notes about keys as well. Guess I'll have to dig them up and find out.
> He looked around at the faces in the crowd and said, “I’m opening the bidding at one dollar.” I about shit myself. I bid the $1 immediately to get things rolling. Well, after I bid, he looked around and said, “Once, twice, sold that man there for $1.” I just laughed… and wondered how the Hell I was going to get this pallet home and what I was going to do with all those books.
> When I asked the auctioneer afterwards why he’d let it go so cheaply, he said, “Did you see anyone trampling you to get in a bid?” I said no, I didn’t. His reply, with a smirk on his face, was, “Gotta’ know your audience in this job.”
> Well, needless to say, I got the books home and spent a few years going through them and selling some, giving some away, etc. However, that’s not the point of this story. The point was finding things in books. So, with that in mind…
Dude goes to an auction and finds books. Nobody bids on the books. Dude is amazed that the auctioneer is willing to sell him something nobody wants for a low price. Dude spends years going through those books.
The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars (sold individually on the second-hand book market, after being carefully catalogued etc.), but nobody interested in buying books happened to be at the auction and the auctioneer set a $1 minimum bid because he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. The auction house could surely get significantly more for their books if they knew the right venue to sell them (somewhere frequented by used booksellers), but I guess it wasn’t worth their trouble to figure out where that might be.
This is sort of like the time I went to a car auction as a kid and some college students bought a lightly used stretch limo in perfect working order for (the minimum bid of) $100.
I quite recently bought a used book for something like $100. Certain books can be expensive, it was not a popular or particularly good book, but the writer was a character and I guess therefore his written books are valuable niche items... Also no more will be printed, so there is limited supply. Similar for some old music sheets or records.
However these are definitely not liquid, if you are going to sell them you maybe have to store them for a long time.
A lot of older books that are now out of print often run many hundreds of dollars, if not more. For example, I've been trying to find a complete unabridged edition of Fraser's Golden Bough, which isn't that niche - you'll find it cited somewhere in any work on mythology- and it seems to run in the high-hundreds to low thousands. A quick look shows a first edition selling for 12k all by itself.
Similarly, I'm looking for the complete Collected Works of Carl Jung, and that's got a hefty price too. Maybe one day. :)
I'm sure both of these examples are sitting in some old man's study and are getting sold for nothing at estate sales, if they aren't just thrown in a dumpster or pulped after being donated to a library that can't get rid of them either. But nobody is indexing estate sales.
But a pallet of old academic books is unlikely to be composed of such books. It is probable that most of the books are worth less than the cost of shipping, and some of the books will have some value but not tremendous value. It is astonishing the number of wonderful, high quality books that can be bought on Abebooks for $1.
Did you look at the picture? https://i.imgur.com/0qiTKSQ.jpg Books I commonly buy secondhand that look roughly like those pictured are anywhere from $10–$200 each (depending on how common the particular book/edition is); we’re talking about pretty ordinary old academic books, nothing fancy or extremely rare. A pallet of books is ~500–1000 books (there are maybe 400 in the picture, but the blog author claims that is a "sampling").
That's selection bias because you are only looking at books that you actually wanted. An average book is worth much less than a book that someone actually wants.
An average (~worthless) book is something like a pulp romance novel, political book by a sitting politician, self-help guide, .... These are printed in the millions and used copies can typically be found for $1–$5 + shipping costs. That’s not the same kind of books primarily shown/described here.
Any scholarly person who loves old hardback books and spends a few decades collecting ones they personally want or need is going to end up with some worthless books, a large number that sell for $10–50 each, and a few that are worth hundreds each. It’s just inevitable, unless they go out of their way to only collect junk.
If I had to guess I’d put the price of the old man’s collection in the $10k–$30k range. But it’s plausible it could be more, if he collected anything rare.
Idk with the amount of books referenced and the definitive fact the some of them were resold at least indicates a good chance of making thousands of dollars, otherwise It’s logical to assume if the effort has not been worth it the author would have commented as such.
I have a book printed less than 5 years ago that routinely sells for $800 online now. The niche religious press that published it simply cannot keep all of the authors work in print and his more academic work gets printed maybe once a decade in a run of 1000.
The article said, "there were some very old, and often valuable, books in this boxes," which is somewhat difficult to interpret but seems to be saying that many of the books were valuable in the sense of fetching a high price, unlike those sold on the rather offensive page you link.
Good auctioneers make sure that there is a buyer for specific things like that. I'm surprised that there wasn't a used book buyer in the crowd. Though maybe his guy didn't show up.
That depends. For things they expect to go be worth a lot they want two buyers. However for things like scrap metal they just want one buyer - they know that buyer will get a great deal, but the value in scrap isn't high enough to support two and so getting a second buyer means both will disappear soon.
It's a Salvation Army auction. I imagine the main purpose is to dump stuff that they haven't found any other use for. They get all this stuff for free, any money they happen to make from an auction is just a nice bonus.
Exactly this - and 99% of the time a “pallet of books from Salvation Army/Goodwill” will be entirely romance novels and cookbooks and not worth the pulp.
I'm not sure I agree with this. The prices that things sold at might have been cheaper 20 years ago, but the advent of the web with used-goods marketplaces has allowed people to access things that were previously not available or hard to find.
I can go onto ebay and order things from the US that were never available locally in my home country. The same with Yahoo! Auctions for items sold only to the Japanese market. And not only can I access things that I couldn't before, but I can easily search for things. Want a copy of an obscure record? No need to search dozens of local stores - Discogs will probably have a few copies for sale. Need a book to complete a collection? Try a quick search on Amazon or Abebooks.
While the prices that things sell for may be higher, I find that it is considerably easier to collect things now than it would have been before the web.
I mostly agree, but there are exceptions. For my birthday a couple years ago my son showed up with a couple cardboard boxes full of books. Turned out to be a complete set of "Great Books of the Western World," worth well over $1,000. He had picked it up for about $30 at an estate sale a couple days before.
I bought a bunch of architecture books a few years ago at an estate sale for $5. Flipped through them and my son looked them up on eBay - we sold the collection for several thousand dollars.
In the late 90s in Atlanta I got my first ever Mac computer (Performa iirc??) at an estate sale for free because it was "broken". The way we established that it was broken was because the power switch on the back of it did not do anything. I got home, did some light digging on the internet and determined that the power switch on the back is the main power, and that actually turning on the computer involved pushing one of the keys on the keyboard.
> he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale.
This reminds me of one of the strangest things I ever read in the books:
My Arabic Library
About eighteen months before I arrived in Iraq, one of my predecessors had ordered My Arabic Library, $88,000 worth of books, an entire shipping container. My Arabic Library was a Bush-era, US government–wide project to translate classic American books, so we now have Tom Sawyer, The House of the Seven Gables, and Of Mice and Men in Arabic. The Embassy had big plans for the books, claiming, “It is so important that the children of Baghdad, the next generation of leaders of Iraq, obtain basic literacy skills. A love of learning and literacy will mean better job opportunities for them when they grow up. They will be able to better support their families and help build a more prosperous Iraq.”
Everyone forgot about the books until we learned that a truck was bringing them in from Jordan. After our prayers that the driver would abandon the truck en route failed, my team was stuck with the problem of what to do with a container of books that no one wanted. Apparently, there was little interest among Iraqi schools in reading The Crucible or Moby-Dick, as the books didn’t fit into their centralized curriculum. I was charged with getting rid of them, to anywhere; the lucky winner needed only a truck. We cajoled a nearby school to take the whole mess from us as a personal favor. Their only condition was that they would not have to do the loading themselves, so that is how a couple of us ended up humping books into a flatbed truck while a high school principal and a local truck driver sat in the shade smoking, watching us. We heard later from a third party that, failing to sell the books on the black market, the principal just dumped them behind the school.
Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
This was very strange to me cause I used to think of American government as very efficient, and with experience of solving exactly the same problem many times already - Germany, Japan, Korea. And the thought that somebody could just waste my yearly taxes on nothing - was very strange and disturbing.
The idea of sending books that are deeply close to American history seems like an obviously terrible idea. Yeah no shit that wasn't going to resonate with an Iraqi child. A lot of these books are culturally foreign to American kids.
Great books are often cross-cultural. We Russian kids enjoyed Tom Sawyer very much. “It”s not every day that a boy gets a chance to paint a fence”… There was (and is) a lot of buzz in Russian culture about Moby Dick though I personally failed to enjoy it. Never heard of Of Mice and Men though - probably because our communists were rather puritanic.
I think problem was that planting a book-reading habits require a lot more work than providing books.
> “It is so important that the children of Baghdad, the next generation of leaders of Iraq, obtain basic literacy skills. A love of learning and literacy will mean better job opportunities for them when they grow up. They will be able to better support their families and help build a more prosperous Iraq.”
Baghdad, before the invasion, was known for the high percentage of readers compared to other cities in the Middle East. We -Arabs- had a saying: "Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads." I doubt the above quote being the true goal of "My Arabic Library" project. I guess it was an attempt to change the culture of people by exposing them to American literature, which would help eventually the political cause of US government in Iraq.
I can’t speak for the mind of the State Department, obviously - but I guess the main purpose of the project was to advance its author’s career. Van Buren’s book is full of such projects, whose main goals were to look good on American television - just once is good. Total lack of a strategic vision.
But if there was a strategic vision in some unseen echelons of American decision making - its goal does not look like to make Iraq successful.
There's a lot of people you can randomly encounter, especially on the internet, if you're curious enough to wander around in the vast series of tubes. I always go around like a creep clicking on various links, finding people's websites and profiles, and joining their groups or sending them a message. A lot of interesting people that I've even made friends with, I have encountered this way, and I have many tales to tell.
I wrote about this once before, but I had a very similar situation, except with family photos instead of books. The story was that someone's apartment was cleared out after they were evicted. Well, after a few years of the stuff sitting in storage, I got around to looking through it, and with a bit of sleuthing, I tracked down the person who the family photos belonged to and gave them a call.
The call did not go well. It is certainly possible that I could have approached the phone call better, and maybe I should have tried harder, but they were suspicious, rude, and quite possibly upset. So I never took the family photos to them, and eventually disposed of them.
You really never know how people will respond to having their past thrust at them like this. Or how they'll respond to strange phone calls.
You really never know how people will respond to having their past thrust at them like this. Or how they'll respond to strange phone calls.
I've bought many books over the years that had prior owner's names marked inside somewhere. On a few occasions I've bothered to try and identify/find the person in question. Once or twice I was successful, but I never bothered contacting them just to say "Hey, I bought this book you used to own". Well, except for one time.
I was on an Inductive Logic Programming / Prolog kick, and bought several used books on the subject. Something like two or three had all been owned by the same previous owner. I looked him up and found out that he was an academic and appeared to still be working, so I thought "what the heck" and sent him a note just to say "Hey, funny story, I bought these books and <blah, blah, blah>."
Not sure what I expected, if anything, in return, but the response I did get was quite chilly. It was something along the lines of "Oh, I donated those to a place that was supposed to be sending them to Africa" or something like that. There was definitely no sense that this individual was happy to hear from the new owner of his old books, or was interested in discussing the subject.
Which is fine. Like I said, I had no idea what to expect, and certainly would have had no right to expect any particular response. But it just goes to show... you are correct in saying
"You really never know how people will respond to having their past thrust at them like this. Or how they'll respond to strange phone calls." (or strange emails in this case)
When I was young, my collection of books ebbed and flowed based on how much spare cash I had. In lean times, I'd end up selling them, then eventually accumulate more. Once I got my career on a more consistent path, I collected books and ended up with a pretty diverse set, but in the back of my head I used the fact that I hadn't sold them as a barometer for my financial stability. Anyway, a couple of years ago, at the behest of my wife, I went through and culled about 1/3 of them. Took them to Half Price Books, where I was offered $8 for the lot. At first I was a little taken aback by that price, but then I realized I was handing them a box of the shittiest books I owned. If anyone doxes me to tell me how lovely their third-hand copy of Chilton's 1984 Audi 4000 manual is...I mean I would congratulate them for their effort, but I don't exactly sit around pining about a reconnection to that book.
When I moved out of my parent's home I of course left a bunch of random stuff behind including a few boxes of books that I didn't want to haul. Left them in the garage and forgot about them. A few years later my dad was cleaning up the darker corners of the garage and called me up, 'Hey there are some boxes of books in the garage, do you want them or can I just take them to goodwill.' I didn't want them at the time, I hadn't wanted them for years and I couldn't be bothered, so he ended up donating them.
A few years later I got a hankering to read the Dune series again and realized that they had been in one of those boxes. So I went to a used bookstore and found all the original dune books but god emperor. A few weeks later in another used bookstore I found a copy of god emperor. A beat up paperback, beat up in a very particular way. I flipped to the inner back cover where I found my initials. Apparently somehow my copy of god emperor donated out on the kitsap peninsula years before made it's way into a second hand book shop in seattle where I repurchased it.
If anyone doxes me to tell me how lovely their third-hand copy of Chilton's 1984 Audi 4000 manual is.
Fair enough. But at the same time, I'd almost bet that somewhere, out there, is some person who sold their copy of the Chilton's 1984 Audi 4000 manual, but JUST LOVED THAT CAR, and loves all things Audi, and would be tickled to tears to meet another Audi owner/enthusiast, etc, yadda yadda. That connection would probably result in the two individuals becoming lifelong friends or something.
You can beat yourself up over it, but the reality is that you're right: Some people handle the past differently from others.
You did the right thing by attempting to reunite them with their (presumably) priceless property. Most people likely wouldn't react this way. I know my parents lost a TON of personal items, including countless photos, when the moving company that was hired by the USAF to move them out of CA to another assignment went under. I'd imagine they'd both have been amazed, surprised, and incredibly grateful for someone to have gone through the trouble you did.
...but who knows? Perhaps there was a divorce or bad blood in that family. At least you can say for certain you have a clear conscience, though!
> I know my parents lost a TON of personal items, including countless photos, when the moving company that was hired by the USAF to move them out of CA to another assignment went under.
I'm close to someone who grew up in the military and lost ~all their family photos and childhood things the same [EDIT: "a similar", rather] way. A little bit lost with every move, nearly all of it gone by the end. Might be a common problem for folks in the military even if something weird like the moving company going under mid-move doesn't happen.
I think you're right, unfortunately. If it's not lost wholesale (as in my parents' case) it's a war of attrition.
They had a number of interesting artifacts (my mother's Australian) and other items that would've been of value for posterity's sake. Especially now that my father has since passed--photographs from his earlier years would have been worth much more to us now.
As a Christian, I'm not hugely fussed over the loss of the material things, but the archivist in my heart is pained to no end!
I found a bunch of books and photo albums sitting out for garbage collection.
The albums were full of family photos stretching over years. I tracked down the owner via facebook. She had moved to another country and -- I suspect had separated from her husband.
She was not interested in the photo albums. It seemed rather poignant. I wonder what the story was behind it.
This has nothing to do with books, but my (now ex) wife and I met another couple many years ago, and we were friendly for a short while until they moved away. A year later, my wife got an itch to talk to the other wife. She had no address or contact info, but my wife was part bloodhound at this sort of thing, remembered her mentioning her parents in another state, and eventually tracked them down to see if she could get the other lady's contact info.
The other lady called my wife back... and the conversation went something like "how did you find me? Please don't ever contact me or my parents again, just pretend you never met me, and please, please, don't ever let my husband know where I am."
In the 80's my family lost a suitcase of family photos and letters. Literally fell of a truck in the middle of Siberia. a few year later they were reunited with them thanks to a stranger who found them and tracked my family down (obviously this was pre-internet). My family was very grateful.
Yesterday heard an NPR story on a similar topic - A librarian collects all the things left in books — from love letters to old photos -- https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1114851706
The WaPo article - Librarian finds love notes, doodles in books and shares them with a grateful public -- https://wapo.st/3SjGKNv
reminds me, in the mid 80s, of my friend and I who made a lot of gun powder when we were young, we pretty much got all the things we needed out of the encyclopedia. The potassium nitrate was easily available, in bulk, at the garden store, as well as Sulphur. We'd use lumps of charcoal on sandpaper and got a fantastically fine powder. We made various kinds of fireworks, then we started putting it in pipes and folding the ends over and we started getting "booms". We kept doing this until we made things that we started getting too scare to set off. We had quite a few close calls where pieces of shrapnel went wizzing by. We did this in my backyard, it was odd my parents were kind of ok with this (up until a point....) my dad who was a research physicist worked at a large scientific institute and must of talking to his friends at work about our adventures, and someone there gave him all these old chemicals, metals, and all kinds to take home. Things like magnesium which makes for great fireworks like things. Some iodine, which we turned into a super shock sensitive explosive (by mixing it with ammonia). Then there was a can of sodium pellets. Our experience with sodium had been what we had seen in class, you put a bit in water, and you get this pretty good fizz/fire reaction. Sort of was expecting this, these pellets were much bigger than anything we'd seen been put in water, so we just popped one in a bucket of water expecting a massive fizzing and buzzing around of the pellet..... but ..... nope, it did a bit of fizzing for half a second before it exploded sending burning sodium all over the back yard....luckily it didn't set anything on fire, but my parents weren't at impressed at this experiment and banned all further experiments. Now looking back on it, I just keep thinking... WHAT THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS THINKING?
Strangest thing I ever found in a book was a unexpired unused sealed condom pack in a religious book in a hotel nightstand; normally search my hotel rooms to make sure there no obvious things that shouldn’t be there, were mistakenly left, etc.
Nitpicky point here, but that's not localhost - localhost is typically 127.0.0.1 (although the entire /8 is reserved for loopback use, this is the only address defined in a typical hosts file).
In grad school, I checked a book out of the library and found an envelope for a congratulations card with something like $50 in it in various small bills. I felt bad because it seemed like it was a collection for a gift or something but there was no name on it. But I didn't feel so bad that I went to see if the library could tell me who checked the book out before me...
I realize it is not the same as finding a friend, but I recently found five crisp $20 bills in a used logic text book at an Amvets thrift store. I opened the book because it was written by Irving Copi, who wrote my undergrad logic text. I was paranoid it was counterfeit, but it was very much real money. To make things better, the first $20 I spent was to get a pizza and the employee said a mistake happened at the pizzeria and they accidentally made too many pies and gave me an extra large pie for free. I was on a roll.
I went through a couple years where I was finding cash kind of a lot. Not life changing amounts, but something.
At work in the secure area when locking up I found a 10 inside the door. I didn't know what to do with it so I tacked it on the bulletin board by the door. Really obvious. Nobody took it for 2 weeks (which is kind of remarkable), so I took it back to buy lunch.
I found a twenty in the snow on the street in cambridge. But it was new snow and easy to follow the tracks. It led to the security guard at the University. He was really thankfully to have it back.
Later that spring I found a crumpled $50 blowing down the street. It was near the faculty club. "Tumble Money" my partner said. Also 50s aren't really common. I kept 30 and donated 20 to charity.
But lamentably my good fortune in the finding of cash has come to an end. Perhaps the rise of the credit card changed my fortunes.
> At work in the secure area when locking up I found a 10 inside the door. I didn't know what to do with it so I tacked it on the bulletin board by the door. Really obvious. Nobody took it for 2 weeks (which is kind of remarkable), so I took it back to buy lunch.
When I've worked in secure areas, I've never had the slightest concern about theft. We even did an experiment where we left a couple $1 bills out on the table in the coffee area for a week... anybody could have picked them up, especially the security guards and janitors who roamed the building at night with nobody else around, but they just stayed there.
Working in that sort of high-trust environment is really, really nice.
If I still worked in such a place, I'd be willing to try the experiment with $100.
On the other hand I'd speculate that in a workplace, people are more likely to pick up $3 than they are to pick up $100. "It's just a couple bucks, somebody probably just forgot it here"
Kind of related, I had some instant noodles that I didn't much care for, so I taped some money to them and left them with a note in a common area anonymously saying that I would pay someone to take them. I had to add more money a few times before someone did. It's amusing to invert the system.
There are some places in Asia where you can go to a coffee shop, let your $1000+ laptop on a table, go for a 30 mins walk, come back and nothing happened neither to your laptop or your bag. I actually do it all the time.
I'm sure I could be gone all day and nothing would happen but after 40 mins some instinct kicks in and I feel the urge to go back check everything's still there.
This goes back to when my daughter was little, many years pre-covid. Whenever we went to a pizza restaurant that had a mini arcade with games and vending machines, she would check all of the change return trays. And inevitably, she would come back with a quarter or two. Every time. I figured maybe it was luck coming from her Irish ancestry.
I found $20 on my
block this morning in New Orleans. It belonged to my neighbor across the street fixing his car. He offered me a beer at 945 in the morning. I guess this city is a high trust environment :D
> I found a twenty in the snow on the street in cambridge.
The most money I've found was in Cambridge (USA), in Harvard Square.
There was an envelope/paper on the ground of a traffic island, and in it was a bunch of cash. I couldn't see anyone around who might've just dropped it, so, on a hunch, I walked into the nearest bank. I waited in line, got to the teller, and said, this is a long shot, but did they happen to know who dropped this money. As I was saying that, someone off to the side spoke up and said it was them. They'd been making the deposit for the nearby small store where they worked. They offered me a big discount in the store.
Other than that, I track found pennies in GnuCash, to have an accurate accounting of my luck and/or sidewalk germ exposure.
>But lamentably my good fortune in the finding of cash has come to an end. Perhaps the rise of the credit card changed my fortunes.
I'm a moderator of /r/silverbugs and we see some fun ones sometimes, if you pop over there and search "coinstar" you'll find the occasional post where members check the coin return on coinstar machines (you dump coins into a hopper, it gives you a gift card/credit at the store) and find 90% silver coins as the machines tend to reject them. Sadly all I've ever found is a nasty penny or two and a 1 euro coin which I think I chucked in the trash given I'm in central Indiana.
I was with my girlfriend at a restaurant whose decor was filled with a bunch of old furniture and knickknacks. Next to our table was a stack of books. My girlfriend opened the top one and inside the cover was a bunch of money - maybe $200 in twenties?
Over dinner we talked about what to do about this, and ultimately she added $20 more to the stash and left it in the book.
Cash is always interesting. Cash in a logic book too, that seems like clean money!
One time in Japan there was a car sitting in front of my apartment for months, nobody used it, nobody touched it. It seemed abandoned. It definitely looked out of place due to its age as well, though it was in good shape.
Eventually me and the pals got amused, and annoyed, and started to do funny stuff you'd only do if amused and annoyed by an abandoned car. Like, trying the doors on one restless day while you wait for the yakimo hours to arrive.
Unlocked!
A bunch of sports gear, cassettes.
Hatchback?
Sports gear...uh...sexy times stuff...and uh...a purse.
A peek in the purse. My first time seeing thick bundles of cash, basically $100s! Stacks of 'em!
I watched enough movies to know that loose $100s, found loosely, may be OK to take, or even just to ask somebody about.
But bundles, in a purse, in an abandoned car, in a neighborhood where we had heard some organized crime rumors...nope.
Creepy af though. We wondered if she had run away, disappeared, what.
My father once lost quite a large amount of cash that was supposed to be used for an overseas family trip. It was a very awkward situation in our family, because he had the slight suspicion that one of us children could have taken the money. Luckily, about a year later my brother opened a large book on seafaring from my fathers shelf and found an envelope with exactly the missing sum. Only then my father remembered that he had hidden the money there and we could procees with our holiday plannings.
I lent one my cool science fiction books to a good friend, and once I got it back and decided to re-read it myself, found that he was using a $10 canadian as bookmark. It's one of my bookmarks now, although I may use it next time I go to Vancouver. Maybe. It's pleasantly plasticky in that ineffable "Canadien" way.
Just before covid started a friend of mine found a $100 bill in a purse at Goodwill, all of our friends went nuts on Facbeook reporting back on all the random (never money) stuff they were finding in pockets of purses/garments at Goodwill over the next couple of weeks.
In a book I found at Goodwill back in 94/95 there was a 8x10 photo of an orangutan sitting alone in a metal cage. It wasn't a part of a book and the book wasn't about apes or zoos or anything related, it was just a random photo someone had stuck in there. I asked how much for the photo, and they gave it to me. I still have it in a box in my office.
Although not really strange, I bought a copy of Green Mansions from a rural, and dingy, old used book store. Stuck deeply in the pages were a bunch of silver certificates of several denominations dating from the 1920s and 30s, through the 1950s. Face value well into the hundreds of dollars. Still have them. Turns out the book itself is a first edition from 1904. Still have it, too.
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So it's likely to have been my mistake.
Edit: I've emailed the mods.
Edit2: It's been fixed.
I once bought about a dozen Doctor Who paperbacks at a garage sale. This was probably 1995.
Half of them contained mysterious hand-written notes which related to "keys".
Cryptic sentences on each paper like, "The fifth key is hard to find, and has many chilly neighbors".
To this day, I have no idea what it was about. Maybe the books and notes are on a shelf at my parent's house somewhere, and I'll take another pass at it some day.
ETA: Possibly references to this serial:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keys_of_Marinus#Plot
Which had 0 to do with any of the books, as I recall. I would swear there was more than 5 notes about keys as well. Guess I'll have to dig them up and find out.
> When I asked the auctioneer afterwards why he’d let it go so cheaply, he said, “Did you see anyone trampling you to get in a bid?” I said no, I didn’t. His reply, with a smirk on his face, was, “Gotta’ know your audience in this job.”
> Well, needless to say, I got the books home and spent a few years going through them and selling some, giving some away, etc. However, that’s not the point of this story. The point was finding things in books. So, with that in mind…
Dude goes to an auction and finds books. Nobody bids on the books. Dude is amazed that the auctioneer is willing to sell him something nobody wants for a low price. Dude spends years going through those books.
I'm happy for this guy.
This is sort of like the time I went to a car auction as a kid and some college students bought a lightly used stretch limo in perfect working order for (the minimum bid of) $100.
The article does not say that or anything remotely similar.
> ... I looked through some of the books in the top boxes and realized that there were some very old, and often valuable, books in this boxes.
You're right that this isn't saying that the books were definitely worth a lot of money, so it really say something remotely similar.
However these are definitely not liquid, if you are going to sell them you maybe have to store them for a long time.
At one point it was hard to get and were selling for $700 - they are now $50.
Had a friend find a bunch of $100 bills in a used book in Salvation Army in SF...
Similarly, I'm looking for the complete Collected Works of Carl Jung, and that's got a hefty price too. Maybe one day. :)
I'm sure both of these examples are sitting in some old man's study and are getting sold for nothing at estate sales, if they aren't just thrown in a dumpster or pulped after being donated to a library that can't get rid of them either. But nobody is indexing estate sales.
Out of curiosity, why this specific publication? Can’t you get everything in that collection from other publications (perhaps not in one volume)?
Any scholarly person who loves old hardback books and spends a few decades collecting ones they personally want or need is going to end up with some worthless books, a large number that sell for $10–50 each, and a few that are worth hundreds each. It’s just inevitable, unless they go out of their way to only collect junk.
If I had to guess I’d put the price of the old man’s collection in the $10k–$30k range. But it’s plausible it could be more, if he collected anything rare.
Books by the Foot will sell you books for about $0.20 per book https://booksbythefoot.com/product/shelf-filler-bulk/
Good auctioneers know what goes to each category.
Nowadays half of the market is flippers and scalpers, prices have shot up, and nobody is getting a pallet of good books for a dollar anymore.
I can go onto ebay and order things from the US that were never available locally in my home country. The same with Yahoo! Auctions for items sold only to the Japanese market. And not only can I access things that I couldn't before, but I can easily search for things. Want a copy of an obscure record? No need to search dozens of local stores - Discogs will probably have a few copies for sale. Need a book to complete a collection? Try a quick search on Amazon or Abebooks.
While the prices that things sell for may be higher, I find that it is considerably easier to collect things now than it would have been before the web.
I bought a bunch of architecture books a few years ago at an estate sale for $5. Flipped through them and my son looked them up on eBay - we sold the collection for several thousand dollars.
I also love the 1999 UI, and it’s super snappy.
Booted up just fine.
I miss estate sales.
This reminds me of one of the strangest things I ever read in the books:
My Arabic Library
About eighteen months before I arrived in Iraq, one of my predecessors had ordered My Arabic Library, $88,000 worth of books, an entire shipping container. My Arabic Library was a Bush-era, US government–wide project to translate classic American books, so we now have Tom Sawyer, The House of the Seven Gables, and Of Mice and Men in Arabic. The Embassy had big plans for the books, claiming, “It is so important that the children of Baghdad, the next generation of leaders of Iraq, obtain basic literacy skills. A love of learning and literacy will mean better job opportunities for them when they grow up. They will be able to better support their families and help build a more prosperous Iraq.”
Everyone forgot about the books until we learned that a truck was bringing them in from Jordan. After our prayers that the driver would abandon the truck en route failed, my team was stuck with the problem of what to do with a container of books that no one wanted. Apparently, there was little interest among Iraqi schools in reading The Crucible or Moby-Dick, as the books didn’t fit into their centralized curriculum. I was charged with getting rid of them, to anywhere; the lucky winner needed only a truck. We cajoled a nearby school to take the whole mess from us as a personal favor. Their only condition was that they would not have to do the loading themselves, so that is how a couple of us ended up humping books into a flatbed truck while a high school principal and a local truck driver sat in the shade smoking, watching us. We heard later from a third party that, failing to sell the books on the black market, the principal just dumped them behind the school.
Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
This was very strange to me cause I used to think of American government as very efficient, and with experience of solving exactly the same problem many times already - Germany, Japan, Korea. And the thought that somebody could just waste my yearly taxes on nothing - was very strange and disturbing.
I've been told the US military is a veritable cornucopia of waste.
I think problem was that planting a book-reading habits require a lot more work than providing books.
Baghdad, before the invasion, was known for the high percentage of readers compared to other cities in the Middle East. We -Arabs- had a saying: "Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads." I doubt the above quote being the true goal of "My Arabic Library" project. I guess it was an attempt to change the culture of people by exposing them to American literature, which would help eventually the political cause of US government in Iraq.
But if there was a strategic vision in some unseen echelons of American decision making - its goal does not look like to make Iraq successful.
The call did not go well. It is certainly possible that I could have approached the phone call better, and maybe I should have tried harder, but they were suspicious, rude, and quite possibly upset. So I never took the family photos to them, and eventually disposed of them.
You really never know how people will respond to having their past thrust at them like this. Or how they'll respond to strange phone calls.
Found a diary hidden in attic and after some research was able to track down the owner and return it; they were happy and enjoyed getting it back.
I've bought many books over the years that had prior owner's names marked inside somewhere. On a few occasions I've bothered to try and identify/find the person in question. Once or twice I was successful, but I never bothered contacting them just to say "Hey, I bought this book you used to own". Well, except for one time.
I was on an Inductive Logic Programming / Prolog kick, and bought several used books on the subject. Something like two or three had all been owned by the same previous owner. I looked him up and found out that he was an academic and appeared to still be working, so I thought "what the heck" and sent him a note just to say "Hey, funny story, I bought these books and <blah, blah, blah>."
Not sure what I expected, if anything, in return, but the response I did get was quite chilly. It was something along the lines of "Oh, I donated those to a place that was supposed to be sending them to Africa" or something like that. There was definitely no sense that this individual was happy to hear from the new owner of his old books, or was interested in discussing the subject.
Which is fine. Like I said, I had no idea what to expect, and certainly would have had no right to expect any particular response. But it just goes to show... you are correct in saying
"You really never know how people will respond to having their past thrust at them like this. Or how they'll respond to strange phone calls." (or strange emails in this case)
A few years later I got a hankering to read the Dune series again and realized that they had been in one of those boxes. So I went to a used bookstore and found all the original dune books but god emperor. A few weeks later in another used bookstore I found a copy of god emperor. A beat up paperback, beat up in a very particular way. I flipped to the inner back cover where I found my initials. Apparently somehow my copy of god emperor donated out on the kitsap peninsula years before made it's way into a second hand book shop in seattle where I repurchased it.
Fair enough. But at the same time, I'd almost bet that somewhere, out there, is some person who sold their copy of the Chilton's 1984 Audi 4000 manual, but JUST LOVED THAT CAR, and loves all things Audi, and would be tickled to tears to meet another Audi owner/enthusiast, etc, yadda yadda. That connection would probably result in the two individuals becoming lifelong friends or something.
It's all so unpredictable. Heh.
You did the right thing by attempting to reunite them with their (presumably) priceless property. Most people likely wouldn't react this way. I know my parents lost a TON of personal items, including countless photos, when the moving company that was hired by the USAF to move them out of CA to another assignment went under. I'd imagine they'd both have been amazed, surprised, and incredibly grateful for someone to have gone through the trouble you did.
...but who knows? Perhaps there was a divorce or bad blood in that family. At least you can say for certain you have a clear conscience, though!
I'm close to someone who grew up in the military and lost ~all their family photos and childhood things the same [EDIT: "a similar", rather] way. A little bit lost with every move, nearly all of it gone by the end. Might be a common problem for folks in the military even if something weird like the moving company going under mid-move doesn't happen.
They had a number of interesting artifacts (my mother's Australian) and other items that would've been of value for posterity's sake. Especially now that my father has since passed--photographs from his earlier years would have been worth much more to us now.
As a Christian, I'm not hugely fussed over the loss of the material things, but the archivist in my heart is pained to no end!
The albums were full of family photos stretching over years. I tracked down the owner via facebook. She had moved to another country and -- I suspect had separated from her husband.
She was not interested in the photo albums. It seemed rather poignant. I wonder what the story was behind it.
The other lady called my wife back... and the conversation went something like "how did you find me? Please don't ever contact me or my parents again, just pretend you never met me, and please, please, don't ever let my husband know where I am."
The WaPo article - Librarian finds love notes, doodles in books and shares them with a grateful public -- https://wapo.st/3SjGKNv
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/wf3e99/r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/wf3e99/r...
1: https://i.imgur.com/pevfen5.png
At work in the secure area when locking up I found a 10 inside the door. I didn't know what to do with it so I tacked it on the bulletin board by the door. Really obvious. Nobody took it for 2 weeks (which is kind of remarkable), so I took it back to buy lunch.
I found a twenty in the snow on the street in cambridge. But it was new snow and easy to follow the tracks. It led to the security guard at the University. He was really thankfully to have it back.
Later that spring I found a crumpled $50 blowing down the street. It was near the faculty club. "Tumble Money" my partner said. Also 50s aren't really common. I kept 30 and donated 20 to charity.
But lamentably my good fortune in the finding of cash has come to an end. Perhaps the rise of the credit card changed my fortunes.
When I've worked in secure areas, I've never had the slightest concern about theft. We even did an experiment where we left a couple $1 bills out on the table in the coffee area for a week... anybody could have picked them up, especially the security guards and janitors who roamed the building at night with nobody else around, but they just stayed there.
Working in that sort of high-trust environment is really, really nice.
On the other hand I'd speculate that in a workplace, people are more likely to pick up $3 than they are to pick up $100. "It's just a couple bucks, somebody probably just forgot it here"
I'm sure I could be gone all day and nothing would happen but after 40 mins some instinct kicks in and I feel the urge to go back check everything's still there.
( oak cliff in Dallas )
The most money I've found was in Cambridge (USA), in Harvard Square.
There was an envelope/paper on the ground of a traffic island, and in it was a bunch of cash. I couldn't see anyone around who might've just dropped it, so, on a hunch, I walked into the nearest bank. I waited in line, got to the teller, and said, this is a long shot, but did they happen to know who dropped this money. As I was saying that, someone off to the side spoke up and said it was them. They'd been making the deposit for the nearby small store where they worked. They offered me a big discount in the store.
Other than that, I track found pennies in GnuCash, to have an accurate accounting of my luck and/or sidewalk germ exposure.
I'm a moderator of /r/silverbugs and we see some fun ones sometimes, if you pop over there and search "coinstar" you'll find the occasional post where members check the coin return on coinstar machines (you dump coins into a hopper, it gives you a gift card/credit at the store) and find 90% silver coins as the machines tend to reject them. Sadly all I've ever found is a nasty penny or two and a 1 euro coin which I think I chucked in the trash given I'm in central Indiana.
Over dinner we talked about what to do about this, and ultimately she added $20 more to the stash and left it in the book.
That restaurant is now gone.
Story would be even better if you had traded the pizza for 10 bitcoin.
At least that's what I tell myself when someone randomly finds $100 in a book...
One time in Japan there was a car sitting in front of my apartment for months, nobody used it, nobody touched it. It seemed abandoned. It definitely looked out of place due to its age as well, though it was in good shape.
Eventually me and the pals got amused, and annoyed, and started to do funny stuff you'd only do if amused and annoyed by an abandoned car. Like, trying the doors on one restless day while you wait for the yakimo hours to arrive.
Unlocked!
A bunch of sports gear, cassettes.
Hatchback?
Sports gear...uh...sexy times stuff...and uh...a purse.
A peek in the purse. My first time seeing thick bundles of cash, basically $100s! Stacks of 'em!
I watched enough movies to know that loose $100s, found loosely, may be OK to take, or even just to ask somebody about.
But bundles, in a purse, in an abandoned car, in a neighborhood where we had heard some organized crime rumors...nope.
Creepy af though. We wondered if she had run away, disappeared, what.