A collection of lost items

Time to finish reading for the night! Looking around for a bookmark, Matilda realizes there’s none to be found. Luckily, the sweet note her child wrote for her is still on the coffee table, so she grabs that to hold her place. The next day, Matilda realizes her book is due at the library. Not thinking, she return it, bookmark and all.

Matilda is not the first to leave a personal item in a library book, nor will she be the last. According to Gibson Memorial Library Programming Specialist Heather Pingree, this happens more often than one might think.

“Not every day or every time, but we’ll get the books in and if we flip through them we may find an old photograph or bookmarks or money or something,” Pingree said. When found, the items are set aside while staff looks up who last checked out the book. The library will then contact that patron to return their item.

Though contact is usually made, only about 50% of the personal items are picked up. Pingree said the rest are kept behind the desk until someone claims them or continue in at the library into perpetuity.

“We just keep it in that little box there and we notify the patron. If they come and get it or not is up to them, but we try to get it back to them,” Pingree said. “I was talking to some other staff, and they were saying that there’s been a lot of stuff in here that’s been around a long time. Just old things like notes or photographs.”

One photograph is dated to the 1950s, though the staff has doubts it’s been at the library since then. Another photo eventually got back to its owner after a bit of research.

“There was this one patron that left some old photographs in the book and we couldn’t get ahold of that person. A coworker, she knew a relative and she got ahold of him,” Pingree said. “They came and got those pictures. It was just kind of random.”

Gibson Memorial is hardly the first library to have a collection of lost items. In 2022, NPR did a story on a public library in Oakland, California, who’s collection includes everything from train tickets, a never-mailed post card and even a crochet hook.

“I had always collected little things I’d found in library books and I knew other people did that too,” librarian Sharon McKellar said. “So that was how it started. It was pretty simple, I was inspired by a magazine called Found Magazine.”

Items found by at the Oakland Public Library are entered into an online database, where people around the world can view notes, art, photos and other artifacts left in library books.

While Creston’s library hasn’t received quite that many lost items, a recent Facebook post about a ticket to the Pearl Harbor National Memorial left in a book sparked a conversation of items both found and left in library or thrift books.

While the library will keep these found items for a long time, make sure to check in case one of your interim bookmarks has been added to the collection.