At Used-Book Stores, Unintended Mysteries Are Often the Best
A book is a good place to stash personal, valuable, embarrassing stuff. Unless, forgetting all about the stuff, you sell the book to a used book store.
"I'd always have a book with me when I got arrested," said Richard Ryan on being told that his 1985 rap sheet had fallen out of a book at the Strand, a store on Broadway in Manhattan where anybody can flip through a heap of two million volumes. "Books end up as filing cabinets," Mr. Ryan says, remembering his days as a student apartheid protester. "I'm sure I got my arrest ticket and filed it in the book."
Clearing his shelves years later, he unloaded a few hundred hardbacks -- rap sheet inadvertently included -- into one corner of the book business that has lately been doing well. Americans bought 150 million old books last year, reports Ipsos BookTrends. Online used-book sales, Forrester Research predicts, could double and hit $2 billion by 2007. The more books people dump, the more tittle-tattle they pass on to strangers.
Which is how the Strand's staff came to know that William Richard Ryan, at the age of 23, was charged with criminal trespass for a sit-in at Cornell University on Nelson Mandela's 67th birthday. He was acquitted, but his arrest record, with a nice set of fingerprints, still wound up on a pile of book-borne scraps at the Strand's information desk.
"It's about as definitive a trail as one can leave," says Mr. Ryan, who is now 42 and heads Verse Theater Manhattan, a group that puts on poetic dramas. Whether he likes it or not, the uncataloged archive of oddments that slip out of old books has acquired a fragment of his past.
At the Strand's main desk, Richard Lilly said, "Let this be a warning to those who don't look through books before they sell. Bored clerks see it all." He laid open a copy of "Diverse Images -- Photographs From the New Orleans Museum of Art." Lodged between pages 62 and 81 was a spent bullet. "Another piece of a life that can't be tracked," said Mr. Lilly, who runs the Strand's art department. "It could be worse. At least there's no blood."
Erin Thompson, who enters new buys into the Strand's computer, found a key in a book and wears it on a string around her neck. Ephemera drift up on her desk: the Louths' hand-drawn family tree. An ink sketch dated 1901 -- hidden in a 1969 Christmas card -- of a horse pulling a plow. A doctor's prescription pad with the following notations: "Wednesday -- mambo, lindy, spins. Thursday -- rumba or tango. At work -- angry. Really got angry. How to use?"
"Yesterday, I found this really cool picture of this naked wrestler guy," Ms. Thompson says. In the fiction department, Ben McFall says: "I have a collection at home, which I can't bring in, of men in negligees. How do these things get away from people?"
Easily. A letter from Mrs. Robert E. Lee once dropped out of an old novel at Main Street Fine Books in Galina, Ill., birthplace of Ulysses S. Grant. Books from the Crypt in Gaithersburg, Md., found a 1933 horse-race tip-sheet in a 1938 copy of "Astounding Stories." Christmas Every Day, a used bookstore in Dallas, acquires leftovers from Christmas dinners in leftover Christmas books.
At the Strand -- New York's oldest and biggest independent used-book seller -- the most gripping finds produce new enigmas. Adam Davis, a 25-year-old from Oregon, took a job as a Strand clerk when he came to New York three years ago to write fiction. One day, he opened a copy of Barbara Tuchman's medieval history, "A Distant Mirror," and discovered a birth certificate. The baby's father was listed as "not known." An attached rider, dated years later, named the father.
Wrapped inside the certificate was a snapshot of a woman posing nude in a motel room, and one, in black-and-white, of what appeared to be the same woman as a child. There were some traveler's-check receipts, and the stub of a train ticket, issued shortly after the date on the rider, for a trip to the town where the birth certificate was issued.
"It's as if the book picked up a new story," says Mr. Davis. "I'm not sure I want to know the whole truth. The suppositions are so interesting." The fiction he has been writing since coming to work at the Strand, he says, has been about "the previous owners of books, based on the traces they left in them."
Novelist A.S. Byatt did the same in "Possession," which begins with a letter left in an old tome. Novelist David Bowman extended the theme: He deliberately filled a first edition of his novel "Let the Dog Drive" with letters from publishers rejecting it, and then sold it to the Strand. "They gave me a good price," Mr. Bowman says.
Used books often gain value from forgotten paper -- paper money, for example; the Strand's staff rakes in lots of that. They haven't yet found a "hell scene with fish monster," as Cristiana Romelli did two years ago at Sotheby's in London. The original Hieronymus Bosch sketch fell out of a client's old picture album and sold for $276,000. A few years earlier, her colleague Julien Stock found a Michelangelo stuck in a 19th-century scrap book. In 2001, that one brought its owner $12 million.
The Strand did buy a $15 doodled-over book of drawings by the Renaissance artist Ucello. The doodler was Salvador Dali. Fred Bass, the Strand's owner, once opened a book titled "The Bill of Rights" to find it was hollowed out. The bottom of the inside was signed, "Boo! Abbie Hoffman." Mr. Bass says he learned later from Mr. Hoffman that he had hidden a tape recorder in there during the Chicago Seven trial.
Mining the dusty stacks, browsers can strike gold too: a signed photo of Bette Davis; a dried four-leaf clover; a ripped-out flyleaf from a first edition with a poem scrawled on it: "A plague upon/ and to perdition/ the Hun who mars/ a first edition..."
Harvey Frank wasn't pleased, though, to learn that a personal note he wrote had landed in a customer's hands at the Strand. Mr. Frank had slipped it into a copy of his own self-published book of poetry, "My Reservoir of Dreams," before sending it to WOR Radio host Joan Hamburg. "I thought I would bring her into my life," says Mr. Frank, who is 80. Ms. Hamburg remembers the book, vaguely. "I was sort of touched," she says. "I put it on my desk. Or somewhere." She says she has no idea how it ended up in a used-book bin.
Perhaps "Linda" would say the same about the postcard signed "XXXX" mailed to her from Nantucket on July 29, 1965. "I mean, do you love me?" it said. "Please write me. I miss you terribly..." And maybe "Sarah" wouldn't recall how the copy of "Art & Illusion" she was given on her 21st birthday made its way to the Strand with this card inside: "I love you! I hope you enjoy this present. I love you and only you. Yes I do. You. You. You. With love from Nick."
Snippets caught in books never solve these mysteries, but a while ago, Will Bobrowski did add up some clues. He was shelving a book on the Third Reich when an envelope dropped out. Two letters were inside: one from a woman to a Dr. Muller in America; and one signed by an Albert Kesselring. There were two snapshots: one of a group of Nazi officers standing at a table, and another showing one of them leaving a building with Benito Mussolini.
"I went crazy doing research," Mr. Bobrowski says. Soon he knew that Field Marshal Kesselring led Hitler's forces in Italy, was convicted of war crimes in 1947, was pardoned in 1952 -- and was the man walking out of that building with Mussolini.
Mr. Bobrowski thinks these letters and photos may be valuable. He says he might someday give them to an academic institution. Until then -- for safekeeping -- he has tucked them inside an old book.
旧书里面故事多
书籍，是个人秘密、有价值的玩艺儿或尴尬经历的藏身之所。可如果你忘了曾把这些东西藏在书里，把书卖给了旧书商，那它们就不再是私人秘密了。
“我被逮捕那会儿身上经常带著一本书，”理查德?瑞恩(Richard Ryan)说。有人告诉他，他1985年的刑事犯罪登记表在旧书店Strand的一本书中掉了出来。Strand是曼哈顿区百老汇上的一家旧书店，在那里，两百万册旧书任人随意挑选。“书本成了文件柜，”瑞恩说。他回忆起学生年代抗议种族隔离的情景，“我敢肯定，当时我拿到拘捕令就顺手将它塞进一本书里了。”
多年过后，他清理了书架上几百本硬皮书，将它们卖给了这家旧书商，他早忘记有一本书里还夹著当年的犯罪纪录。旧书生意近年来很兴旺。根据Ipsos BookTrends的数据显示，去年美国人买了1.5亿册旧书。Forrester Research预计，网上旧书交易到2007年将翻一倍，达到20亿美元。人们扔掉越多旧书，就有越多的秘密暴露在陌生人眼前。
Strand书店的员工就是这样得知了理查德?瑞恩的隐私。纳尔逊?曼德拉(Nelson Mandela) 67岁生日时，23岁的瑞恩在康奈尔大学参加室内静坐抗议，因此遭到起诉，后来又被宣告无罪。没想到的是他的拘捕令连同一系列指纹却在Strand被发现了。
“这是一个人的生活所能留下的最清晰不过的足迹了，” 瑞恩说。他今年42岁，是诗剧团Verse Theater Manhattan的负责人。不管他喜欢与否，从旧书中滑落的这张纸片暴露了他过去生活的一个小小片断。
在Strand的主柜台边上，理查德?利利(Richard Lilly)说：“这件事提醒人们在卖掉旧书之前要浏览一遍。这里的工作人员在枯燥的工作中常常能发现点他人的秘密。”他打开一本《多样的图像──新奥尔良美术馆收藏照片》，62页到81页之间嵌著一枚弹头。“又是一段无迹可寻的生活插曲，”负责Strand艺术部的利利说，“这还算好的了，至少上面没有血迹。”
埃林?汤普森(Erin Thompson)负责把采购的书目录入到Strand的计算机里。有一次她在一本书里发现一枚钥匙，于是穿上绳子，戴在脖子上。她的桌子上堆著各种记载了生活片断的东西：罗特斯(Louths)的手绘家谱，这是夹在一张1969年的圣诞卡中的速写，上面画著一匹拖犁的马，日期显示是1901年；一个医生的药方纸，上面写著：“周三，曼波音乐，林迪舞，旋转。周四，伦巴或探戈。工作──恼火。真的很气。有什么用呢？”
“昨天，我发现这张很酷的照片──一个光著身子摔跤的家伙，” 汤普森说。小说部的本?麦克福尔(Ben McFall) 也说：“我在家里收集了一些穿女人睡衣的男人照片，我不敢拿出来。真不明白人们怎么让这些东西被别人发现了。”
其实这很容易。罗伯特?E?李(Robert E. Lee)女士写的一封信曾经从伊利诺斯州Galina的Main Street Fine Books书店的一本小说里掉了出来。Galina正是尤利塞斯?格兰特将军(Ulysses S. Grant)的出生地。马里兰州Gaithersburg的Crypt书店发现一张1933年赛马内情报告，它藏在一本1938年版的《惊人故事》里。Dallas的一个旧书店Christmas Every Day则在一本有关圣诞的旧书里发现了圣诞餐吃剩的食物。
Strand是纽约历史最久、规模最大的独立旧书零售商。在这个书店里，最吸引人的发现都是些不可思议的东西。二十五岁的俄勒冈州小伙亚当?戴维斯(Adam Davis)三年前到纽约来写小说，他在Strand谋了个职位。一天，他打开一本巴巴拉?塔奇曼(Barbara Tuchman)的一本中世纪历史书《遥远的镜子》，发现里面夹著一张出生证。婴儿父亲是“未知”，在出生证的附页上才能看到婴儿父亲的名字，但附页所显示的日期已经是几年之后了。
出生证里夹著两张照片，一张是快照，一个女人在汽车旅馆里裸体摆弄著身姿，另一张是小孩的黑白照，像是这个女人童年时的照片。除此之外，还有一些旅行票据，一张火车票的票根，日期是在附页日期的不久之后，而旅行目的地的小镇正是开出生证的地方。
“这本书仿佛告诉了人们一个故事，”戴维斯说。“我还没有想清楚是否要弄清故事的真相。推测本身很有意思。”他说，在Strand上班后他一直坚持在写一本小说，“根据书中留下的线索，叙述这些书过去主人的故事”。
小说家拜厄特(A.S. Byatt)也在“入迷地”写著这样的故事，故事也是以一本旧书中留下的信为开头。另一个小说家大卫?鲍曼(David Bowman)更加利用了这一点：他故意在他的小说《让狗来开车》的第一版中夹进了出版商拒绝出这本书的回信，然后再将书卖给Strand。“这样一来，书店给了我一个不错的价钱，”他说。
旧书常常会因为那些被遗忘的纸片而增值──例如钞票。Strand的员工就在书里发过不少小财，但至今还没有人的运气比得上伦敦Sotheby's书店的克里斯蒂安娜?罗默里(Cristiana Romelli)。她两年前意外得到波希（文艺复兴北派画家）以地狱和鱼形怪兽为主题的速写。这幅原作从一名顾客的旧图集里掉出来，卖了27.6万美元。克里斯蒂安娜的同事朱利恩?斯托克(Julien Stock)几年前还在一本19世纪的剪贴本里发现一幅米开朗琪罗(Michelangelo)的作品，2001年这个意外发现给这个幸运儿带来了一千二百万美元。
Strand也曾经花15美元买进一本文艺复兴时期画家乌切罗(Ucello)的画册，上面被涂得乱七八糟，而涂鸦者却是萨尔瓦多?达利(Salvador Dali)。Strand的老板弗雷德?巴斯(Fred Bass)曾经翻过一本叫《权力法案》的书，发现里面被掏空了，底部写著“嘘！阿比?霍夫曼(Abbie Hoffman)”。巴斯后来从霍夫曼那里了解到，他曾经在里面藏过一盒录音带。
人们也能在一堆堆尘封的旧书中发掘到一些称心如意的东西：贝蒂?戴维斯(Bette Davis)亲笔签名的照片、干了的四叶片的苜蓿、某本书第一版撕下的衬页上潦草地写著的诗：“A plague upon/ and to perdition/ the Hun who mars/ a first edition . . .”
哈维?弗兰克(Harvey Frank)得知他的个人笔记落到Strand的一名客户手中，很不高兴。弗兰克把这张纸片塞进了自行出版的诗集《梦之集》(My Reservoir of Dreams)中，然后寄给了WOR Radio电台主持人琼?汉堡(Joan Hamburg)。“我当初以为能把她带进我的生命中来，”如今80岁的弗兰克说。汉堡女士隐约记得这本书。“我那时有些感动，”她说，“我放在了桌子上，或者别的什么地方。”她说不知道这本书怎么会跑到一个旧书堆里去的。
也许琳达(Linda)也不知道1965年7月29日南特凯(Nantucket)寄给她的署名“XXXX”的明信片是怎么跑到旧书店里来的。明信片上写道：“我的意思是说，你爱我吗？写信给我吧，我好想你！”也许萨拉(Sarah)也不记得21岁生日时别人送给她的《艺术与幻象》是怎么跑到Strand里的，里面夹著的一张卡片写道：“我爱你！我希望你喜欢这份礼物。我爱你，而且只爱你一个。真的。只有你，只有你。爱你的尼克！”
夹在书中的纸片永远也解不开这些谜，但不久前，威尔?博布罗斯基(Will Bobrowski)的确找到了一些线索。一天，他正在书架上摆一本关于德意志第三帝国的书，忽然里面掉出一个信封。里面有两封信：一封是一个女人写给美国一个叫穆勒的博士，另一封署名为阿尔伯特?凯塞林(Albert Kesselring)。里面还有两张快照：一张上面是一队德国军官站在桌子边，另外一张是其中一个军官和本尼托?墨索里尼(Benito Mussolini)正在走出一栋大楼。
“这个发现几乎让我疯狂，”博布罗斯基说。没过多久，他就得知照片上和墨索里尼一起走出大楼的人正是曾经在意大利领导希特勒军队、1947年被定为战犯、1952年获释的大名鼎鼎的阿尔伯特?凯塞林元帅。
博布罗斯基估计这些信和照片会很值钱。他说也许将来会送给某研究机构。但在此之前──为了保险起见──他把它们塞进一本旧书里。
