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’.

They felt the fear and did it anyway. With a train ticket to St Pancras perhaps they went straight onto the Eurostar and had a Parisian adventure!

But how sad that a gift from a Grandpa and Grandma has already ended up in a second hand bookshop when the recipient was only born in 2000, so they'd only be 22 now.

After some of the elderly ladies I've worked for have died I've been invited to choose some of their books and recipe books are great. There are notes made in margins and on scraps of paper, sometimes on headed paper, so you can wonder who lived there. They're treasures.

Wow!!!!

I went to a secondhand bookshop in Stratford upon Avon recently that had a whole wall dedicated to "things found in books". I could have spent ages poring over it.

I agree - it was such a beautiful book and I’m so pleased I did take it home. I wondered how it ended up in a book shop as it would be something you would usually keep. Maybe I will reunite it one day !

I agree the book from the grandparents is sad.

I've still got any that my grandparents wrote in... Ruth's Loose Tooth may not longer relevant in my life (at the moment 😁) but it's a reminder of their love.

I got a recipe book once with a handwritten note of the ingredients for Mrs Magrandi's coconut biscuits. I made them, they were delicious!

I’m always sliding things into my books when I can’t think where else to put them - stray photos, memorial cards, toddler art work, concert tickets. It’s a bad habit like poking sweet wrappers down the sofa cushions.

I love coming across these treasures when I’m looking something up or re reading an old friend. Maybe when I’m gone, and my books are cleared out, there’ll be a thread like this.

That's amazing! Such a good idea.

I found a calling card for Lady "Somebody" of "Somebody" Manor (can't remember the names now) think I still have it somewhere in a drawer, might have a go at digging it out.

@Snozzlemaid Your bookmark would be early 1960s. Mass x-raying for tuberculosis was done in London beginning in the 1940s going through to the early 1960s. The Chest and Heart Association (who are named on it) was not formed until 1959. So it could only be early 60s.

I once bought a book and put it away in my bookcase. Later on I randomly found an unused postcard on my floor that I can only assume had been in that book and fell out.

The picture on it was of Hitler at a rally. 😳

I can't remember what I did with it now, I've moved a couple of times since then so can't remember if it was thrown out or not as I didn't know what to do with it.

Newspaper cuttings and autographs of ballet dancers in the first half of C20, including Margot Fonteyn.

There were quite a few so the bookshop (antiquarian bookseller) must have been aware of them and decided they belonged together, though they could have sold the autographs separately for more. The book is Baron at the Ballet which is a large, heavy hardback.

When I cleared out my grandads house, we found all of my Nana's things where she would have left them. She died in an horrible accident years before and he was never the same after.
It was really surreal seeing the book on her nightstand. There was a bus ticket as the bookmark, it was dated to two days before she died, she was only two chapters from the end.

It felt like it was just sitting there since the 90s waiting for her to get back in bed with him and finish the book.
Weirdly sadder than anything else that day and it was just a bus ticket in a trashy book.

This is a recent find. Piece of newspaper used as a bookmark. I've left it in.

I have a second hand book about cats, short stories, poems, bits of writing and the original owner has filled it with cat related clippings and postcards. It's fab.

I bought a book about Shakespeare and there was a beautiful letter from the male author - an academic - obviously to a male student and recipient of the book as a gift… The author was clearly besotted by the recipient.
I have often wondered if the recipient didn’t care and sold it, or had maybe died and it was sold by next of kin, or treasured but lost and then sold on. Also if it was a mutual love or the author was an exploitative old goat…
I could easily make acquaintance with the author of I was nosy enough to try to elicit the truth 😁.

My Ds going £10 in a library book he was so happy, I've found nothing

I buy lots of second hand books and have never found anything! Not even a book mark! I've actually got a secondhand copy of 'Feel the Fear and do it anyway' due any day so I will cross my fingers!

Brilliant. Thank you.

This is going to be a change from all the other lovely, romantic, historic things mentioned previously but..

my husband donated some books to work once but forgot one had a naked photo of him in it!! He found out 5 years later at a party when someone from HR told him about it. She said they shredded it.

Strangely enough, I went into a charity shop this afternoon and bought a vintage book and inside was an old Christmas themed postcard showing robins, bunnies etc singing carols. Nothing written on it, sadly.

I once bought an old (cloth bound, that kind of old) guidebook on Ancient Greek sites. Inside was a printed & signed faded blue ticket to one of the ruins. Like to think it had been someone on a dashing Grand Tour of some sort.

I love inscriptions in old books. I've bought a few second hand poetry books and once bought two from the same shelf. I didn't realise till I got home that they seem to have belonged to the same woman, (though the first name on the grateful patient one doesn't look like Kate, so maybe that belonged to her relative?)

Arthur's lovely note is dated 1911, I do hope he made it through the first world war.

I love all your stories! Thank you so much for sharing :)