Noel Black recently interviewed me for his Big Something radio show on the Colorado Springs NPR station. He got interested in the things found in books at the Colorado College library and asked me to talk about the collection the library keeps.
Some of the things we’ve found over the last decade were left in books deliberately as a sort of art shenanigan, we believe. Most, we are fairly certain, stayed in the books by accident. Library staff, especially student assistants, have been building the collection for about a decade.
I consider the collection itself to be a kind of shenanigan, since it’s unusual for a library to collect and display odds and ends such as these.
This is fascinating. Thanks for sharing! Now I want to go search all of the library books at my university and see what I find!
You totally should! Maybe your university library has a collection like ours. You could ask your special collections librarian what people have found in books over the years — even if there’s no collection, there may be an answer to that question.