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Paid $2 for a library discard and found a checkout card from 1974 inside
Picked up a beat up hardcover at the Friends of the Library sale in Boise for two bucks, mostly because the cover art was goofy. Flipping through it later I found the old paper checkout card still glued in the back, and the last date stamped was March 1974 with maybe 30 total checkouts over 25 years. Now I am stuck on this: does an old checkout card make a used find more special, or does it just mean nobody wanted the thing for decades? Half of me thinks it is a cool piece of history and the other half thinks I bought a book that bored 30 people in a row. Do you keep the cards and stamps when you find them, or toss them?
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harper_wells1mo ago
Those cards usually only got stamped once per checkout, so 30 stamps would mean 30 people actually read it, not that it bored them. And a book still sitting on the shelf in 1974 with stamps from the 50s and 60s sounds more like it was popular for a while, then just got passed over later.
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