Opening a good book may take you on an adventure, but sometimes, what’s most interesting isn’t what’s on the pages, but what’s been left in them.
A librarian at the Oakland Public Library named Sharon McKellar has been gathering lost trinkets tucked away in books.
All the old family pictures, notes, coupons, recipes, and concert tickets she’s accumulated over the years have now been put to good use.
The “Found in a Library Book” project, which McKellar founded, is an online database of all the items discovered in books at the Oakland, California, library.
She said that it first began as her personal collection but quickly expanded as other library employees began sending items.
According to McKellar, who contacted other library employees to ask if anybody had anything they may be willing to contribute, she was “absolutely bombarded with other people’s tiny collections of stuff they had discovered.”
It was a simple option to continue once I saw that other people had similar items and appreciated them as well.
McKellar said she still has a few hundred artefacts to upload after adding 370 to the library’s online collection.
There are undoubtedly some favourites, and she claimed to like everything made by children.
There are various drawings that resemble those made by children.
One is a sketch made by a youngster called CJ, in which his father looks to be wearing devil horns. Another depicts a robot father.
McKellar said, “I truly appreciate the way youngsters express themselves both in art and writing.
Many of the artefacts are notes, some of which are from children. For example, “Dear Librarian, those three kids over there are making too much noise, and I can’t read and my buddy can’t do his schoolwork,” is one of the messages.
a few from the parents: “Good night, my love bug. Good luck with your sleep tonight.”
a few from associates: “I’ll always adore you, dear. Let’s not bring the past home with us since it is the past.”
Some are book reviews left for the following reader, including: “This book was fantastic. My heart was stolen, and I started crying. You’ll recognise them as mine if you discover tear marks. Enjoy.”
A used playing card, a baggage tag, a Big Red gum wrapper, a pizza voucher, and a pre-paid phone card from Vietnam are among the less significant relics.
There are, of course, several bookmarks as well; one of them says, “I adore my attitude issue.”
While the provenance of the lost artefacts are still unknown, McKellar said that some individuals have identified objects in the online database.
“One individual read what they had written, even though they had never visited the Oakland Public Library since they lived in a neighbouring city.
They don’t know how it got here, so they assume it was a message they wrote for someone else “She spoke.
She said that another individual got in touch with her because one of the love letters resembled the kind of notes her parents used to write to one another.
“Her mother and she had examined it and had come to the conclusion that it was likely a letter sent between the mother and father who had resided in Oakland in the late 1980s.”
The project is still in its early stages, but McKellar hopes it will encourage people to explore the books at their local library because you never know what you’ll discover there.
For example, a library book may contain an old baby picture, a ticket to an Oakland A’s game from 2004, or a map of Japan.
“You just feel like you are in a communal area. Therefore, even if you’re not the one who discovered it or don’t know what book it originated from, you still get the impression that this individual is or was in my group and used similar resources “explained McKellar.
We’ve clearly gone through a moment of detachment with COVID, so it is a way to kind of feel a connection to people who you don’t even know via these artefacts, which is why I think part of why people are so enthusiastic about that right now.