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June 25, 2004

FOUND OBJECTS

A number of people have already linked to this WSJ article about the interesting bits and pieces found between the pages of used books.

"I'd always have a book with me when I got arrested," said Richard Ryan on being told that his 1985 rap sheet had fallen out of a book at the Strand, a store on Broadway in Manhattan where anybody can flip through a heap of two million volumes. "Books end up as filing cabinets," Mr. Ryan says, remembering his days as a student apartheid protester. "I'm sure I got my arrest ticket and filed it in the book."

Clearing his shelves years later, he unloaded a few hundred hardbacks -- rap sheet inadvertently included -- into one corner of the book business that has lately been doing well. Americans bought 150 million old books last year, reports Ipsos BookTrends. Online used-book sales, Forrester Research predicts, could double and hit $2 billion by 2007. The more books people dump, the more tittle-tattle they pass on to strangers.

Which is how the Strand's staff came to know that William Richard Ryan, at the age of 23, was charged with criminal trespass for a sit-in at Cornell University on Nelson Mandela's 67th birthday. He was acquitted, but his arrest record, with a nice set of fingerprints, still wound up on a pile of book-borne scraps at the Strand's information desk.

So since everyone's covered it, why the link, you must be asking yourself. Because I do have my own found object story, also from a book purchased at the Strand. It was a used copy of Gatsby, and when I got home with it, a copy of a letter floated out, which I reproduce in its entirety here:

June 1, 1965

Dear Mr. Nathan -

I would like to thank you for the nice hair dryer. The lady at the Salvation Army gave me your name and address so I could write and thank you. I am 64 year old [sic] and have been at the old ladies home since 1956 - The lady in the next bed has had a hair dryer for 4 years, but she never let me use it. Last night her hairdryer fell off her table and now it dont [sic] work. Today she asked me to loan her my hairdryer and I said fuck you.

God bless you for giving me the hairdryer.

Yours truly,
Mrs. Anna Habicken.

I've learned since that the letter is a fake - there are other versions of it floating around out there - but I still keep it framed on my desk, and for years I told people it contains everything one needs to know about good storytelling.

Posted by TEV at 12:28 AM |

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Comments

As Tim O'Brien said, "Just 'cause it didn't happen don't mean it ain't true."

Posted by: Jimmy Beck | June 25, 2004 at 05:58 AM

I learned after working for five years in a used book store (The Book Exchange, Durham, NC) to be VERY careful about what I left in books, and what I inscribed in books I gave to others. These days I hardly write more than "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Birthday", out of fear that some heartfelt inscription will end up on shelf, priced at $4.95. As for found objects, the law students at the Baptist college just outside the Triangle left the filthiest notes in their casebooks.

Posted by: Tom | June 25, 2004 at 09:06 AM

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