Every secondhand book has lived a life before it reaches us. Somebody chose it, carried it around, lent it to a friend, lost it behind a sofa and found it again. Then, for reasons we will never know, they let it go.
Which is where we come in. We buy and sort a great many books at Moss Books, which means we open a great many books. And every so often, something falls out.
Reader, we are nosy. It comes with the job. So here is a tour of the strangest, sweetest and most surprising things we've found tucked inside secondhand books. Everything below is real, and we've left out every name and personal detail. Let's start with the finds that look as though they wandered in from another shelf.
Books inside books (and other things that shouldn't be there)
Our favourite surprise is the double take: a book inside a book. A small magazine folded into the middle of a hefty hardback. A thin booklet slipped between the pages of something much bigger, like a secret passenger. It happens more often than you would think, and it never stops being funny.
Then there are the scribbled notes on scraps of paper, and the newspaper cuttings, snipped out with great care and put away for safekeeping. We almost never know why. A review? A story about the author? Something that happened the day the book was bought? The cutting doesn't say, and that's half the fun.
And maps. Folded small, flattened by years between the pages, and carrying a plan we will never hear about. Somebody was going somewhere. We just don't know where. And sometimes what we find doesn't just hint at a person. It shows us one.
Hello from a hundred years ago
Some books come with faces. Every now and then an old photograph slips out from between the pages, and it is obvious from the way it has been kept that it mattered to someone. You don't tuck a photograph into a book you don't care about.
Here's the thing: some of our books are a hundred years old, so the photographs often are too. A century-old book with a century-old photograph still inside it, the two of them together after all that time. We hold them with great care, and we look a little longer than we strictly need to.
As it happens, we stock very old books. If you like your reading with a bit of history attached, come and have a browse. You never know who might be waiting between the pages. A photograph can only show us a face. Other finds come with the words still attached.
Letters, notes and the first page
Handwritten letters turn up too. A letter tucked into a book is a conversation that somebody never quite finished, or never needed to. We handle them gently, feel a little like we're intruding, and put them back where they belong.
Then there's the first page, where the inscriptions live, in every kind of handwriting, from every kind of person:
Parents writing to their children
Grandparents writing to their grandchildren
Children writing to their parents and grandparents
Friends, wishing each other a happy birthday
Someone who came across a good book by chance and thought of a friend
That last one is our favourite. It is the smallest gesture in the world: I saw this and thought of you. It was written in ink, and it's still here years later.
And then there are the strange ones. Some inscriptions are so peculiar that we read them twice, look at each other and say nothing at all. We'll keep those to ourselves. Not every keepsake comes in handwriting, though.
Pressed flowers, leaves and bookmarks
Pressed flowers and leaves are a classic. Someone picked them on a day worth remembering and pressed them between the pages to keep. Years later they turn up flat as paper and delicate as a whisper.
Some keepsakes were made for books in the first place: bookmarks, in every kind you can imagine. We've found vintage ones, leather ones and all sorts in between, each chosen by someone who clearly took their place in a book seriously.
And postcards, doing double duty as bookmarks. A little window into somebody else's holiday, left behind for the next reader. And speaking of journeys, not every souvenir is a pretty one.
The paper trail: tickets, timetables and receipts
Some of our favourite finds are small scraps of paper that say, very quietly, I was here. Train tickets. Plane tickets. Cinema tickets. And an Air France timetable from the 1930s, which is a whole other era of travel folded up inside a book.
The receipts for the books themselves are a treat too. Books bought decades ago for a few dozen pence. Prices so small they look like typos. If you've bought a paperback lately, it's a humbling thing to see.
And yes, we have found actual money. A hundred pounds, quietly minding its own business between the pages. Then again, a book doesn't have to hide anything to show it has been loved.
The marks readers leave behind
Not everything inside a book is an object. Some of it is ink. Notes scribbled in the margins. Lines drawn under the bits somebody wanted to remember. Every underline is a reader saying: this bit, this one, this matters.
And then there are the water stains: a book that has clearly been read near a cup of tea, in the bath, or in a very ambitious rain shower. We don't judge. A book with a few marks on it is a book that has been properly read, and we have a soft spot for those. All of which brings us to what we do with everything we find.
Why we leave it all where we found it
We have one rule. We respect the book.
Everything inside it, from the letters to the photographs to the pressed flowers, is part of the book's character. It is part of the story. So we don't take these things out, and we never sell them separately. They stay tucked in with the book they came with, waiting for the next reader to find them.
The same respect goes for the people behind them. We've left every name and personal detail out of this post on purpose. Everything we've described is something we genuinely found, and every previous owner stays anonymous.
And if you'd like a few surprises of your own, you'll find us at 3 St George's Place, Cheltenham.
Have you found something unexpected inside a secondhand book? Tell us in the comments. We'd love to hear about it.
If you're lucky, your next secondhand book will come with a surprise of its own, so have a browse and try your luck.
