Things you find in second hand books

[BuddhaAtSea]

This morning a book I ordered arrived, this train ticket was in it. Made me wonder where they were going 10 years ago, travelling from East Midlands to St Pancras. The book was ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway’.

I think they were travelling to meet a new potential partner 🙂

I love buying secondhand books for this reason! I’ve found tickets, postcards, notes, inscriptions

I never knew this was a thing. A good few months ago, in a charity shop, I bought a book with a personal note for the person it was gifted to. It obviously didn’t touch a cord, just a nerve, it was still brand new!
I love when this (finding snippets of other people’s lives) happens, and I’m glad I’m not the only one :)

An advertising postcard for a terrace cafe in Greece - it looked lovely!

Numerous bookmarks.

An itemised ASDA receipt that was a few years old.

@Jewelanemone , do you think they made it work, when they met? Maybe they conquered their fear. The book doesn’t look well read 😂

I bought a second hand copy of a book which was Alice In Wonderland with the original annotated columns down the sides and the original illustrations along with a really old original copy of the Brothers Grimm Fairytales and inside the Alice one, there was a beautiful inscription to a child from their grandfather written in old-fashioned script and in the Brothers Grimm book, there was a pink postcard which had co-ordinates and clues handwritten in really neat, careful handwriting.
I'd bought the books for my mum as a surprise and I left the pink postcard inside and it's intrigued her as much as it did me - you never know, we might find treasure one day as a result 😜

I bought an old and rather shabby family bible (dated 1615) and it has records of family births and deaths (sadly including the death of an infant a few days after the birth was recorded) written in on a number of pages and covering about 100 years. It also has a much later bookplate (late 1800s) which shows it was then owned by one of the original contributors to the OED.

A bogey once in an old 80s Misty annual I bought from eBay 😬

I got this one recently

I found this great bookmark once.
Would love to know the year it was issued.

Lots of postcards and letters, obviously used as bookmarks.

Best inscription was a personal message from Noel Streatfeild in a first edition of Thursday’s Child (50p).

A bookmark obviously made during WW2 urging people to donate cigarettes for the troops. Sod's law means I can't recall what book it's in.

Have a few secondhand books with 'happy birthday' and 'happy Christmas' inscriptions as well, not to mention the owner's address from 50/60 years ago. Sometimes wonder where that person is now.

I bought a second hand copy of A Brief History of Time from an Amazon book seller. It turned out to be a photocopied version, bound, and the cover done in a shiny cardboard. TBF it was a good fake version. Inside was this note.

'The street near Dave's' 😂😂

Hi Op
I didn't know this was a thing too about charity shops.
I love going to charity shops ,I have worked in a few where I live too,

I have found a black and white photo of girl I would say about 12 or very teens on a beach with her family,
I have thought of, putting in a brief notice enquiry in local newspaper if this photo brings back happy memories for someone
@FrankTheCondor
Wow, i wish i was lucky, as your son finding twenty notes quite often in his philosophy books like that.😀

I was drawn to a beautiful bible in a second hand book shop in Marlow. I couldn’t leave it behind so took it home and this was the message in it. I also like Psalm 121 as was read at a friends funeral.

I recently bought a second-hand scholarly book online. Nothing special in the description. When I received it I realised it's a first edition, autographed by the author to her mum and dad, to whom the book is dedicated (though it's their names that are printed in the book).

While I love that I own such a thing, I also find it sad. The book is less than 20y old, so her parents must have died relatively recently, and whoever cleared their house did not think their daughter's work worth keeping.

Bus tickets, train tickets, shopping lists, a child's drawing, torn bits of greetings cards, addressed envelopes (but not letter inside) and sometimes underlinings in pen (how RUDE!) and notes in the margins.

I alway enjoy finding them, even if they are in my book that I last read many years ago.

A dead butterfly

It was a Tuesday do nothing too thrilling.
Work meeting I would say.

Civil service ?

It would be amazing if a Mumsnetter remembered that train journey.

That did make me smile. The Vietnamese addresses, and then the very English name of Dave. I wonder if Dave is a place, such as a bar, or someone they knew.

There's a fab Instagram account called 'inusedbooks' dedicated to this