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Creasy Spines

“Every crease is a story.”

Illustration of the kind of find described. We don't reproduce press photographs.
Letter· 2010s–2020s

A coded Mother’s Day note inside La Belle Sauvage

By the Editors · As reported by Newsweek, 8 January 2026

FoundBaltimore, Maryland, United States

Tucked inside La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman

Sydney, a reader in Baltimore, bought a secondhand collector’s edition of Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage through the resale app PangoBooks and found a handwritten note in cipher halfway through. Reddit users cracked it within hours: a belated Mother’s Day message signed BG, saying the writer hoped she would like the book and had not yet read it. Sydney suspects the intended reader never found it. She now uses the note as her bookmark for the series.

This is our summary of a find reported in the press. For the full story, photographs and any updates, read the original report in Newsweek.

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