“Every crease is a story.”
Found in Books
Letters, tickets, pressed flowers and pencilled notes — the small things that turn up between the pages of secondhand books.
An introduction
Open an old book and, now and then, something falls out. A tram ticket. A pressed violet that has stained its outline onto both pages. A letter that begins “My dear” and ends without a surname. Booksellers have always kept a drawer of these things; readers tuck them into a diary, or back between the pages where they were found.
Found in Books is where they go on show. Every find in the gallery is photographed and described by the person who discovered it, tied to the book it was hiding in, and pinned — roughly — to the place it turned up. Some are funny, some are tender, and each one carries the chance of finding its way back to the family it came from.
The cabinet of finds
Twelve drawers, from love letters to banknotes. Every find in the gallery is filed under one of them.
Folded into quarters and slipped between chapters — sometimes never sent, sometimes never read.
How it works
I
Lay the find on a plain surface in good light. Up to four photos — the front, the back, and the page it was tucked into. Location data is stripped from every image.
II
Which book was it in, roughly where and when did you find it, and what do you make of it? Search our catalogue to link the exact title.
III
A moderator checks every submission — covering private details where needed — before it joins the gallery, where readers can heart and share it.
Reuniting finds
Every find carries a “Does this belong to your family?” form. A grandmother’s handwriting on a recipe card or a great-uncle in a seaside snapshot can travel a long way from home.
Step 1
Tell us
Send a private note from the find's page explaining the connection.
Step 2
We check
Moderators read every request. Contact details are never made public.
Step 3
We introduce
If it adds up, we put you in touch with the finder so the keepsake can go home.
Your turn
A photo, a few lines about where you found it, and the title of the book. That’s all it takes to give a forgotten keepsake a second life.
Deckle-edged snapshots with a pencilled date on the back, used as a bookmark and then forgotten.
Violets, clover, a sprig of heather. Heavy books make good flower presses, and plenty were used as one.
Bus, tram, theatre and cinema stubs: a reader's day, measured out in chapters.
A name, a date, a few words in ink. The flyleaf is where a book stops being stock and becomes a gift.
Pencilled underlinings, exclamation marks and arguments with the author, kept for decades.
Index cards in cookery books, butter-stained, quantities in ounces, with a family name in the title.
A child's crayon picture folded to exactly the size of the page, as if made to live there.
Till slips from shops long closed — often the only record of where and when a book was bought.
Silk ribbons, leather tabs, shop giveaways and seaside souvenirs, still marking someone's place.
Old notes and the odd postal order, tucked away for safekeeping and never collected.
Feathers, four-leaf clovers, locks of hair, shopping lists. Readers keep the strangest things.
Locations are rounded to about 1 km. Please cover the full names, addresses and phone numbers of living people before you upload.