Message in a Book

A few weeks ago I took my granddaughter to a used bookstore. I, of course, did some browsing myself. I came upon a volume that was on my always-increasing want list and bought it. One thing led to another, as they often do, and the book — The Best American Mystery Stories 2015, edited by James Patterson — sat patiently on my headboard until a few days ago.

I was looking for something short to read before bedtime and which did not involve a screen. The aforementioned volume seemed to be the perfect source for something of that nature. I picked it up, opened it, and started turning pages. I reached the Foreward and found two small white cards inserted into the book’s gutter. One was a business card for a hospital liaison employed with a local senior living community. The other was the gift card which I photographed and have reproduced above.

I have since been intermittently preoccupied with this discovery. It does not look as if the book was ever read past the Foreward, if, indeed, at all. I would like to think that the recipient, after whatever life event occasioned their stay at the facility, quickly recovered and was too busy enjoying liquid (as the card suggested) and horizontal (as the card did not!) refreshments to read the book. This, I fear, is wishful thinking. It is probably far more likely that they have gone ahead, leaving the book behind to be packed up with others and taken to the used bookstore where it eventually passed to me.

That would be nosy me. I went so far as to call the person whose name and telephone number were on the business card, assuming, due to the close proximity of the cards in the book, that they were the giver. My intent was to explain that the book passed into my hands and to ask, generally, if the recipient ever got to drink that Manhattan, thinking that answering that question, as phrased, would not violate any HIPAA rules. Alas. The giver no longer worked at the facility. Another unsolved mystery.

I wonder what happened to the last owner of the book in question.  It bothers me, probably because of my age, and also probably because I’m in contact with a number of my high school classmates as we approach our fifty-year reunion in July. Many are joking that they are not going to send in their reservations before June 30. They are joking, but not really laughing. I totally get it. We inhabit fragile and temporary shells that slip and slide toward an unmarked and unknown use-by date.

Enough of sad-sack me for today. Have you ever found a cryptic message or note in a book? If so, please share. Thank you for stopping by, and enjoy your weekend.

 

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About Joe Hartlaub

Joe Hartlaub is an attorney, author, actor and book and music reviewer. Joe is a Fox News contributor on book publishing industry and publishing law and has participated on several panels dealing with book, film, and music business law. He lives with his family in Westerville, Ohio.

34 thoughts on “Message in a Book

  1. Yes, but it was several years ago and I don’t remember what the wayward private message said.

    In other news, my own 49th HS reunion happens late next month. I’d like to hang around and wait for the next one (50) but alas, the school is so small they have a reunion only every two years and of course all classes are invited.

    Every day is a gift, they say. I like the version I learned in the USMC: Every day’s a holiday, every meal a banquet.

    Back in the day, that was delivered n a sarcastic tone, of course. But today, with the passing of the years, it seems more of a stubborn mantra, and one I try to take to heart.

    Be well, Joe.

    • Thank you, Harvey, and you as well. As the saying goes, yesterday is the past, tomorrow is the future, and today is a gift, which is why it is called the present.

      My class has a regular reunion every five years, a mini-reunion every year, and has more recently instituted a weekly meetup. Somehow it all happens without knife fights. Enjoy yours!

  2. LIke Harvey, I can’t remember what the note said. Joe’s column reminded me that the note had stimulated a story.

    A search through my “EricsFiction” folder found “TheChekhovPocket.odt,” created 2017-11-01. But my joy was not to be. Only two paragraphs had ever gotten written: Someone finds a note tucked in the plastic library cover of a volume of Chekhov stories of crime and suspense. (An appropriate volume–and the description fit with my memory of where I had actually found the note.) But neither the contents of the actual note nor the contents of the intended fictional note had made it into the proto-opus.

    Would the story have used the actual contents of the note? Alas, I can’t remember. Sic transit gloria mundi.

    • That’s a cool story, Eric, if you can’t quite remember the contents of the note. Thanks for sharing.

      This topic seems especially relevant to me as this morning I watched John Wick III — Parabellum and in the opening half-hour John kills an attacker with a library book…

  3. Alas, no notes, but several “ex libris” scrawling signatures and “Happy (fill in the occasion)” notes, but this HAS generated a “what if…” for my list of what ifs…(a la Mr. Beversluis above…).

    Enjoy your 50th WHEN you get there, Sir…

    • Good point, Priscilla. The test key would be an even better find! Thanks!

  4. I don’t remember notes left in books but I was thinking what a good mystery story it would make. There were only about 100 people in my high school class graduating in 1959 so there are few now. I never got back for a reunion. If you’re still working on your WIP you mentioned once before, all the best. —- Suzanne

    • Suzanne, I recently spoke with someone who had an older friend who noted that they didn’t have enough surviving members of their high school graduating class to have a card game. Scary. Thanks for your good wishes and for asking, and yes indeed, I am very much working on my WIP, and happily so!

  5. Yes Joe, and I am writing a novel totally based on what I found. It was a set of Washington Irving’s greatest works, published in 1892, if I remember correctly. Ten books in all. The front inside cover of each book was stamped with the name of the owner, a name that I looked up and found only one such named human being, who died in 1932 and is buried in Minnesota. Inside one of the books I found a further piece of gold – a note from a family member to, I presume, other family members, about his mother’s mental illness, and what they were doing for her, written with such openness and honesty that I felt a bit like a Peeping Tom to be reading it.
    Anyway, these artifacts have formed the basis of what I hope will be an interesting story, set in Minnesota, in 1962, with tentacles reaching back into the 20s and 30s.

  6. Haven’t found any notes but I get curious just seeing someone’s name written in a book. Nothing I’ve followed up on, but you can’t help but wonder whose hands a book have passed through. I especially get that feeling with the type of books I collect–historical reference–usually on Arizona and the west of the 1800’s or early 1900’s.

    Those types of books tended to have been published around the 1950’s, some older, some younger, but I see names in books and wonder what Arizona was like when THAT person got the book and what they had seen & done in the years before I was even born.

    Within the last year I got my hands on what I believe to be a first edition copy (or close) of “The Big Bonanza” published circa 1875–a book on the big strike around Virginia City Nevada (anybody old enough to know the show Bonanza will recognize the area). But you just can’t help but wonder whose hands that book have touched & the things they’ve experienced.

    Now that I think of it, it would be fun to leave a series of short notes in my entire collection of books. That may or may not come to light in another person’s hands after I’m not here to look after them. 😎

    • Brenda, thanks for sharing, particularly re: The Big Bonanza. That’s quite a find. I like your idea about leaving a series of notes in your books. Who knows, you might generate an idea for a novel or story for someone…

  7. With the patient privacy laws, the person on the business card wouldn’t have told you anything. The privacy laws can be scary. A friend of mine was moved last week from the local hospital to a physical rehab facility across the state. If I hadn’t been in the room with her when she received the news, I and all her friends would not have been able to find her. A good idea for a mystery. The moral of this story is to give the family member on your admission info with the hospital a list of people to contact. To make it easier choose one person from each social group as the point of contact who will pass along the info to the people in that group.

    As to finding things in books. Nothing terribly exciting. Someone’s credit card statement. A good thing I’m honest. Appointment cards. A few really lovely bookmarks. Author signatures on first editions.

    One author I know puts promo material like bookmarks in library books and used books. Libraries do a very thorough job of emptying things like that so that’s not a great idea.

    • Marilynn, you could probably use that credit card statement as a jumping off point for a story. I’m thinking of one already. Maybe two. That’s also interesting about your author friend putting their promotional materials in other authors’ books. I think that the library will figure it out sooner or later. Thanks for sharing.

  8. I’ve never found anything like that, but once I went to my bookshelf to find a nook I wanted to re-read and realized I had donated it to Goodwill years ago. I said a prayer that I would find it again and a week later I did, at a different used bookstore – one I had never been to and haven’t been to since.

    • It’s interesting how things circle around, isn’t it, Cynthia? Thanks for the story.

  9. I don’t have a real note-in-book story. I do have one I made up.

    I have a series-in-progress about an inactive U.S. Marine military police officer who keeps running into paranormal–not necessarily supernatural–situations involving cryptid creatures.

    In one of my stories, my main character is the armed protector for a search party of hundreds that is gathered to find a Downs child in southeast Tennessee, along the fabled popular and fictitious Davy Crockett Memorial Trail. On the third day of the organized search, the particular part of the group of searchers she is assigned to protect runs across a cabin. Because she is the designated protector, she approaches the ramshackle house to see if the residents might have seen the little girl. As she gets closer to the cabin, she smells essence of death. She halts her group and goes to the door. Before entering, she notifies the sheriff’s radio detail what she suspects. They authorize her to knock-and-enter.

    When she does, she finds a deceased woman sitting in a chair with a huge Bible on her lap. On the Bible are a pen and paper. She walks around behind the deceased to see a scrawled note on the paper slip. “You have to be careful if you want to live. If they scream at sundown, it is already too late for you to get awa–“

    • Jim, thank you (I think) for sharing your idea. I have a…thing about people sneaking up on me. The room where I watch television has a sliding glass door behind the chair I sit in and I had to quit watch Walking Dead because I kept imaging walkers staggering across the back yard and getting ready to pound on the glass. Anyway, it sounds like a great book you’re working on!

  10. I always like that scene where the note falls out of the book…I just went to a book fair at the local library and picked up a book about trees of Indiana. A bunch of old–I mean, old–postcards of movie posters with Rudolph Valentino, Harlow, Mae West were stuck in the back cover. They were unused, and now I’m putting them to use. How very long, Rudi and Mae, pressed between the pages, and now they are making the rounds again…

  11. I found a bundle of checks and something like 2 or 3 hundred dollars in a library book. Was a page in the library, took it to the desk. Back in that day and age, we could look up who had borrowed a book and contact them fairly easily. She was grateful. Assorted cards, letters, cryptic notes, and grocery lists are about all I have ever found. 🙂 I also received a note from Jim Harrison a few years before he died, telling me I owed him a drink! LOL! (He’d sent us a signed book, we were supposed to have sent a postage paid return envelope).

    • Thank you, KIm. I will bet that your library page self about fell out when that happened, Kim. Thank you for your honesty. I would like to think that everyone would have done the same thing but…I don’t know. The Jim Harrison story is a hoot as well.

  12. Also, one of my favorite books has a note that is stuck in something (not a book) and the main character finds it. The note changes her life and many people in the book. Written by Dorothy Gilman, it is called. The Tightrope Walker. very suspenseful. Worth reading if you’re interested.

    • Thanks for that, Kim. It sounds interesting. I just ordered a Kindle sample of it. It’s a fairly short novel if anyone is looking for an intriguing story that is a relatively quick read…

    • Gilman wrote the Mrs Pollifax series about an elderly widow who becomes a spy. A very successful one, in fact, who ends up solving a mystery or two along the way. I loved that series.

  13. “An unmarked and unknown use-by date.”
    That’s a stellar line, Joe!
    I hope your reunion is fantastic and memorable in all the good ways..

    I’ve always joked that anyone I knew in high-school is either dead or in jail (or wouldn’t be someone who would attend reunions!.) But I moved in a very small clique, so it’s not as remarkable as it might sound.
    However, I often wish I’d been able to attend a bit earlier, as I went to the same school as author Anne Rice and her husband Stan. I wonder if we had the same Creative Writing teacher!

    As to mysterious notes found in books: none yet for me. As a child I sometimes found money in my mother’s paperbacks. Considering she rarely ever keeps a book after reading it, I probably should be checking what she gives away!

    • Thank you, Cyn, that’s very kind of you. My graduating class is relatively sedate but includes some of the finest people I have ever known, each in their own way. It should be interesting. This will be the first formal reunion I’ve attended so it should be fun.

      Definitely…check out your mom’s books. Benjamins as bookmarks…

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