Credit cards, cash, and what they hope is candy: What librarians find in returns
When borrowed books make their way back to a library, oftentimes librarians find a little something extra tucked inside.
“This is fairly common,” said Ritu Chhabra, customer services supervisor at the Naperville Public Library's 95th Street branch. “When people are reading books in bed or on their couch and need to put it down, they're looking for anything to use as a bookmark, and sometimes they can be so creative.”
Suburban librarians say that because they find all sorts of items inside returned books, almost on a daily basis, only the really unusual things stick with them.
“I'm guessing it was about 10 years ago that I found $500 in cash in an envelope tucked inside a book that had been returned the day before or early that morning,” said Rachael Rezek, community services librarian at Fremont Public Library in Mundelein. “We were able to hunt the person down who had left it in the book, and they were quite grateful to get it back.”
The money was intended to be someone's graduation gift, Rezek recalled.
“Sometimes, though, you find things you wish you hadn't,” she said. “I once found what I hope was a candy bar.”
New - and sometimes used - Band-Aids, tissues and hair ties also show up with some frequency, librarians said. Those types of things get tossed.
Almost every suburban library has a bin of misplaced items waiting to be reunited with their owners, but librarians in Oakland, California, have taken the curation of these tchotchkes to the next level.
Oakland librarians created the wildly popular “Found in a Library Book” Web page at their oaklandlibrary.org website, where such items are cataloged and documented as a sort of online museum.
“I had a couple things I saved that I enjoyed just because they were fun or funny,” Oakland librarian Sharon McKellar told WGN News earlier this month. “We started a new website about 10 years ago, and I thought it would be fun to start sharing some of those items with the public.”
Suburban librarians say if they can track down the owner, they will.
“A few weeks ago I had a gentleman who had a (traffic) ticket from Chicago in a book that we contacted because we didn't want him to accrue a higher fine by being late,” said Shannon Halikias, the director of Messenger Public Library in North Aurora.
Gift cards, losing lottery tickets, bank statements, medical bills, insurance papers, candy wrappers, hotel key cards, trading cards, paychecks and all denominations of cash have been found in returned books.
“Just recently we reunited a lost photograph that was returned in a book to one of our customers,” said Megan Maier, circulation supervisor at Arlington Heights Memorial Library. “It was a picture of her dad who had recently passed, and when we handed it back to her she got pretty teary-eyed at the desk.”
Borrowed items, not just books, get inspected by someone at most public libraries before they are returned to the stacks. But it's the books that most frequently contain forgotten items.
Another common item found inside returned books are actual bookmarks.
“We tend to discard anything that looks pretty generic,” said Warrenville Public Library Director Sandy Whitmer. “But if it's a bookmark that looks like it's important to someone, if it's ornate in some way, or made from wood or metal, or it looks like it was colored by someone's child or something like that, we'll reach out to reunite things that way.”
Every librarian has a story about finding something odd inside a book, they said.
“We always talk about connecting with our community,” said Denise Raleigh, division chief of public relations and development at Elgin's Gail Borden Library District. “The little extras that are left in books remind us that these (books) have become part of someone's life when they have them. And we love the notion that reading is part of the rhythm of everyday life.”