One of the most attention-getting displays we have ever done at the Central library was an exhibit of things we’ve found in library books. You’d see even the most harried or preoccupied patrons stop to peer into the Plexiglas case with its odd assortment of scribbled notes, old Polaroids, postcards, ticket stubs and bookmarks ornate and impromptu. I think our favorite item was a Christmas shopping list in which most of the recipients were dispatched with the same thrifty, homemade gift, an echoing knell of “…sauce. …sauce. …sauce.”
Lately I’ve enjoyed the same fascination with the various compendiums (compendia?) of found objects that pop up in various hiding places throughout the Dewey. For example, the pleasure of discovering that gift 
list can be enjoyed many times over in Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery lists lost and found by Bill Keaggy, with such telling actual lists as “Candy Bars?, Stuff for Juicer, Soy milk, Granola, Tush Cleaner” or the artistically spelled “Cabich, bird fude, nodiles, buttmilk, dog yogurt, bannes, hare sope, cream of salary soup.” It is enough to make you think twice about where you toss your own grocery lists. The best known example of these are the various book length gallimaufries amassed from the pages Davy Rothbart’s Found magazine: Found and Found II. Even the most reluctant voyeur will find themselves transfixed by this assortment of notes passed in class or taped to cars, schoolwork, doodles and scraps, through which one may catch glimpses of loves, hates, vulnerabilities and losses that veer from the hilarious to the tragic.
I had a hard time putting down Babbette Hines’ Photobooth and Nakki Goranin’s American Photobooth, with sequential snapshots that add a hint of the moving picture, capturing successive moments both guarded and un-, as diverse physiognomies arrange themselves according to their owner’s sense of identity, or wished-for identity. This is even clearer in one of 
my favorite title in this genre, the truly amazing LaPorte, Indiana by Jason Bitner. The story goes that Jason and a friend had traveled from Chicago to LaPorte to catch a demolition derby, and stopped in a diner for a bite. Above the eatery there used to be a photographer’s studio, and a back room was filled with box upon box of old photos from their stock, selling for 50 cents apiece. The friends hunkered down, ordered more coffee, and dug through 18,000 proofs from the ’50s and ’60s, and this book represents their most interesting finds – not oddities, but images of breathtaking Midwestern normalcy – beautifully reproduced and artfully arranged. This is not a book to be hurried through, and as you gaze into each pair of eyes and see what is projected and what protected, the cumulative effect is to inspire a curiously overwhelming compassion.
There are a lot more interesting found object works in the library, and you’ll find more here in Shelf Talk soon.
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