Library of Lost Things
The other day, I was reorganizing some bookshelves at home when something fluttered out of a poetry collection I’d picked up during my family’s trip to the UK this past summer. It was a photostrip that my mother and I had taken in a photobooth in the London Underground on the first day of our UK trip this summer. The photostrip had been placed inside the book to keep it safe during our roadtrip to Scotland and international flight back to Dallas and was long forgotten by the time I finally made it home.
When the photos slipped out of the book though, I was instantly transported back to the moment we’d taken them—sweaty from the July heat, hands greasy from the fish and chips we’d had on the walk over from the hotel, gleefully pressed up against each other to smile for the camera while commuting Londoners and wide-eyed tourists alike bustled around just outside of the thin, black curtain of the booth.To stumble back upon this memory so unexpectedly was a privilege. It gave me the same pleasurable feeling of cracking back into my beloved Percy Jackson series for a good comfort read and finding a TARDIS bookmark I’d received for Christmas in middle school. The discovery itself is like a kind of time travel.
Like most readers, though, I don’t always use a traditional paper bookmark. Instead, it’ typically the first “flat-enough” item I can find: A shiny (and empty) gum wrapper. A Post-It note doodled on by a younger sibling. A wedding invitation. Occasionally, the remote to my Fire TV.
Most recently, half of a napkin from Chili’s, torn to avoid sauce in the margins.
Though some of these are humbling to stumble back upon, many unintentionally resurface a memory of a mundane moment that was previously uncherished.
The public and university libraries assembling archives of “Things Left in Returned Books” are doing something very similar. In a simple and unfiltered act of curation, librarians create a venue of displaying the diversity of their patrons.
I first learned of this trend as a transient student at UNT. The UNT Digital Library houses the James Flowers Collection of Ephemera Found in Returned Library Books. Flowers began working as an assistant at the library in 1995 and occasionally collected found items during his shifts.
According to the UNT Digital Library website, it wasn’t until around 2010 that Flowers began intentionally developing his ephemeral collection after “finding a note in an old reference book, which reveals the message, ‘...this won’t be found for 50 maybe 100 years! Now that you’ve found it, was I right? Is it 2035 A.D.?’”
“I found this intriguing, that a book was used as a means to communicate, just like a message in a bottle,” Flowers remarked in a biographical note from UNT. In 2021, Flowers retired and donated his connection of ephemera and found objects to UNT’s Special Collections.
The Oakland Public Library garnered national news attention when librarian Sharon McKellar organized the Found in a Library Book exhibit which ran until December 2022 and remains online as a digital collection.
“It's interesting to me to look at each thing and you can think of a hundred different stories for how it landed here and for who it came from and for what the connection is,” McKellar said in a California interview. “You don't know if those boarding passes are just a boarding pass that they left in the book because it was the bookmark, or if it was the trip where they met their long-lost sister. Who knows?”
It’s no secret that the work of libraries is continually attacked and devalued. Just this week, the Trump Administration abruptly issued a confusing memo regarding a widespread pause on funding to federal agencies.
“Federal funding for libraries, museums, and archives is guaranteed each year by Congress and authorized under law,” according to EveryLibrary, a political nonprofit in support of American libraries. “The administration says it will conduct a comprehensive review of grant recipients' political and social ideology before resuming any funding. Essentially, Trump requires a loyalty test from government agencies before he allows them to resume their work.”
Crayon drawings and apology notes are left in chapter book returns. Lost love letters, grocery receipts, homework, and notes-to-self all form an archive that displays the beautifully indiscriminate work of libraries to patrons of all ages, genders, ethnicities, and financial backgrounds.
The library is a commonspace for common people, and book bans, censorship, and continual cuts in funding put libraries in a precarious place of unsurety. The communities that libraries protect must protect them in return.
When the photos slipped out of the book though, I was instantly transported back to the moment we’d taken them—sweaty from the July heat, hands greasy from the fish and chips we’d had on the walk over from the hotel, gleefully pressed up against each other to smile for the camera while commuting Londoners and wide-eyed tourists alike bustled around just outside of the thin, black curtain of the booth.To stumble back upon this memory so unexpectedly was a privilege. It gave me the same pleasurable feeling of cracking back into my beloved Percy Jackson series for a good comfort read and finding a TARDIS bookmark I’d received for Christmas in middle school. The discovery itself is like a kind of time travel.
Like most readers, though, I don’t always use a traditional paper bookmark. Instead, it’ typically the first “flat-enough” item I can find: A shiny (and empty) gum wrapper. A Post-It note doodled on by a younger sibling. A wedding invitation. Occasionally, the remote to my Fire TV.
Most recently, half of a napkin from Chili’s, torn to avoid sauce in the margins.
Though some of these are humbling to stumble back upon, many unintentionally resurface a memory of a mundane moment that was previously uncherished.
The public and university libraries assembling archives of “Things Left in Returned Books” are doing something very similar. In a simple and unfiltered act of curation, librarians create a venue of displaying the diversity of their patrons.
I first learned of this trend as a transient student at UNT. The UNT Digital Library houses the James Flowers Collection of Ephemera Found in Returned Library Books. Flowers began working as an assistant at the library in 1995 and occasionally collected found items during his shifts.
According to the UNT Digital Library website, it wasn’t until around 2010 that Flowers began intentionally developing his ephemeral collection after “finding a note in an old reference book, which reveals the message, ‘...this won’t be found for 50 maybe 100 years! Now that you’ve found it, was I right? Is it 2035 A.D.?’”
“I found this intriguing, that a book was used as a means to communicate, just like a message in a bottle,” Flowers remarked in a biographical note from UNT. In 2021, Flowers retired and donated his connection of ephemera and found objects to UNT’s Special Collections.
The Oakland Public Library garnered national news attention when librarian Sharon McKellar organized the Found in a Library Book exhibit which ran until December 2022 and remains online as a digital collection.
“It's interesting to me to look at each thing and you can think of a hundred different stories for how it landed here and for who it came from and for what the connection is,” McKellar said in a California interview. “You don't know if those boarding passes are just a boarding pass that they left in the book because it was the bookmark, or if it was the trip where they met their long-lost sister. Who knows?”
It’s no secret that the work of libraries is continually attacked and devalued. Just this week, the Trump Administration abruptly issued a confusing memo regarding a widespread pause on funding to federal agencies.
“Federal funding for libraries, museums, and archives is guaranteed each year by Congress and authorized under law,” according to EveryLibrary, a political nonprofit in support of American libraries. “The administration says it will conduct a comprehensive review of grant recipients' political and social ideology before resuming any funding. Essentially, Trump requires a loyalty test from government agencies before he allows them to resume their work.”
Crayon drawings and apology notes are left in chapter book returns. Lost love letters, grocery receipts, homework, and notes-to-self all form an archive that displays the beautifully indiscriminate work of libraries to patrons of all ages, genders, ethnicities, and financial backgrounds.
The library is a commonspace for common people, and book bans, censorship, and continual cuts in funding put libraries in a precarious place of unsurety. The communities that libraries protect must protect them in return.
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