You never know what you'll find in a book

Courtesy of Lady Crumpet's Armoire: the Wall Street Journal discusses the "unintended mysteries" of personal items left inside used books.

For the readers' delectation, here's a highly selective list of the most interesting debris of previous owners' lives that I've found inside secondhand (or library) books over the years:

* A pressed red rose resting upon the title page of that most chivalric of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Knight's Tale.
* A long, phantasmagoric poem full of occult references, dedicated to the poet's One True Love and inscribed on the flyleaf of an ominous-looking, black-bound copy of Frazier's The Golden Bough.
* A $20 bill, used as a bookmark in a book of model-railroad plans.
* A cancelled check with Ernest Thompson Seton's signature, laid into an inscribed copy of one of his wife's books about southwestern Indians.
* In a long-ago library book sale: an inscription to a friend... from myself!
* Just yesterday, at Suburban Public Library: what appears to be a wallet-sized high-school yearbook photograph of "Kenny", with a note on the back indicating that "it's great to still be friends with you", and also noting that he thinks D. "is really GREAT" and he plans to marry her.