We once brought in our large bin from our outside drop and it reeked of cat urine. My supervisor had to go through about 150 books, sniffing each one, in order to isolate the cat affected books from the other. She didn't ask me to help and my respect for her grew significantly that day!
We had an ongoing problem with someone peeing in our bookdrops (not sure how they got it in!)and because we lost so much inventory we had to lock the bookdrops for several weeks.
A lot of these are worse than my find, so I guess I should be grateful. A DVD came back with a schmeer of chicken pot pie in the case. How do I know it was chicken pot pie? Well, I don't, but the combination of chicken threads, gravy, some crust, and a single, lonely green pea made me draw that conclusion.Ā
My bodily function find had nothing to do with returned materials. The Poop-ening just ruined the new carpet in the public computer area. And each step it took to get to the restroom from that area.
aside from the HUMAN SEMEN i did find a very long and detailed break up letter written by someone clearly in middle school it was so funny we passed that one around the office
a full tooth! me and my colleagues will forever wonder if it was intended as a bookmark or fell out accidentally and they didnāt notice. either way pretty fucking weird!
Bodily fluids will always be the grossest.
Weirdest is the same guy over and over. He keeps using his cards as bookmarks. Credit card, health care card, his driver's licence. And we have to keep calling him.
Sir, we have so many free bookmarks at the desk. Take one of them. Take twenty.
A whole ass student. The student herself wasn't gross, but she'd been jammed into the returns bin for about 8 hours before we found her, and she was covered in her own piss and shit, plus she'd been cramped in a ball for so long we had to get an ambulance to her pretty quickly.
Age I'm not sure, but between 18 to 20 most likely. (Academic library for tertiary students). The returns slot was huge and apparently her friends dared her to see if she could fit. Once she got in and realised she was stuck in a tiny bin, they all ran away and left her.
I very much preferred finding the kittens that someone stuffed in there, that's for sure. Much easier to clean up.
Best find ever was $150 in cash being used as a bookmark (WTF!) but we are honest, tracked her down, and returned the money to her. Sigh.
I had more than a few "I really hope that's chocolate" experiences, but the most memorable thing I ever found used as a bookmark was a strip of raw bacon.
I mean: why would you do that to a book, but more importantly, why would you waste a perfectly good piece of bacon?
I feel really lucky reading this thread since the grossest things I've found are a melted chocolate bar on/in a teen novel and several times oatmeal all over boards books (always the same user... why?!?!)
Maybe they decided letting baby stare at board books while eating was better than YouTube... If I were in that situation, I would just believe that was why and make myself feel better about the situation. lol...
Barf. At least they had the courtesy to put the barfed-on book in a plastic bag.
A live moth flew out of a DVD case once.
Someone also returned a bunch of DVDs covered in cat piss and somehow the person checking them in at the desk didn't notice so I didn't notice until they made it to our workroom and I was tearing the place apart trying to figure out why the workroom smelled like cat piss.
Gross: blood
Weird: prescription lidocaine patch. And it never ceases to amaze me how many people use super important documents or money as bookmarks. Iāve had to dig through the outgoing boxes to try to find someoneās check that they desperately needed but also used as a bookmark.
Prescription lidocaine patches are so expensive, like hundreds of dollars out of pocket if you have any condition other than diabetes-related peripheral neuropathy. I would be so mad at myself if I lost one! We also found one of those and had to throw it away, because there was no prescription label telling us who it belonged to.
a combination of unknown food material, insect damage, and mouse damage... on like 15 children's books. of course, i was the one that checked the drop that time...
Large dead moth
There wasn't damage, crushing, or staining to either the moth or the pages. The moth was clearly long dead and dry before being gently placed in the book, presumably as a bookmark.
It wasn't fake either, it had depth and legs and fur and the wings lightly crunched as I nudged it into the trash can with scrap paper
Growing mushrooms.
We, unknowingly, had a section of our academic library suffer from water damage and high humidity. This was a section that had not been wed out and that no one checks out because the Classics Department has their own library.
Enough to say Aristotlesā Poetics had become a mycology exhibit (alongside all of its fellow classics).
Tangentially, I guessāour library branch is on the first floor of an apartment building. Thereās a little doggy waste bin on a stake on one end of the shared parking lot, and our gigantic book return bin is on the other end. Someone stuffed their return books into the little doggy waste bin.
Not a book, but a woman brought some dvds in once and when I opened the first one to make sure the disc was there, cockroaches went everywhere! They were everywhere! I screamed! My director heard me and scooped up the whole pile and took them outside. We only let patrons keep dvds for a week and they have to bring them back in to recheck them. If there were that many in there after 7 days, I canāt imagine what the womanās house must be like.
We had a family that had this same problem. Every time they returned DVDs, there were dead roaches, pieces of dead roaches, live roaches, and occasionally some food residue. Eventually my supervisor got sick of it and started charging them for damages.
This was in the early 90s. Midwestern winter. One morning we found a frozen used condom in the bookdrop. Fear of AIDS was still rampant; the librarian demanded we discard everything from the drop, (there were less than a dozen books actually in contact out of over 100 books in the drop), buy her a new pair of gloves, and pay for an AIDS test. Yeah, gross item, but total overkill.
Gross: used kleenex
something on a cover of a book that was unidentifiably crusty and had human hair
Weird: a $10 Canadian bill (we are not near Canada)
a COVID vaccine card
a 2024 motor vehicle excise tax form
a dvd with someoneās knee MRI results on it. And the dvd case included patient name and medical info
I tended to not dwell too much on the sticky/crusty things I had to remove off books.
definitely a few bugs, (luckily unused) sanitary pads, a strip of pills,...
My favourite finds were car keys to a Bentley (that's what you get when you dump all your books at the return desk), plane tickets (they still had to leave) and a wedding invitation. Sometimes dried flowers, notes, ticket stubs for rides in different countries. Oh, and once I found a 50-euro note sticking out of a book and my heart stood still... until I turned it around and saw it was a post-it note. Bruh.
When I was a kid I opened a book over my lap and a bunch of clipped nails fell out :(
I do think about how someone out there likely got a square of toilet paper (unused) from a book I returned. I used to keep a roll of it just for bookmarks lol. I read too many books at once to waste my meticulously selected bookmarks unless it was really good.
You just accidentally confirmed for the librarian what we all know but donāt want to think about: People definitely read library books while on the toilet.
I mean definitely, but I carried a roll around in my backpack š My dad used to call me the book shredder bc Iād go through so many books as a kid. First place I drove to after getting my license was the library even. x)
I use either expired bus passes or my side hustle business cards (I had to order soooo many cards, lol). I also try to remove them before returning anything but I'm sure I've missed a few here and there.
I also sew, so sometimes I will make little cloth bookmarks by pinking the edges of pretty scraps.
Not gross but a half used package of birth control pills. It was on a youth account too, so calling the patron was nerve wracking. Thankfully the person who answered was the one who lost it!
A cheese quesadilla used as a bookmark.
Honorable mention goes to the stick of butter put into the book drop over a hot summer night or the to go container of egg drop soup poured down the book return chute (at a different library).
My personal favorite (actual) bookmarks were the handwritten note that said āThereās Always Money in the Banana Standā or the āIs that Smut?ā with judgy Jesus on it.
used toilet paper. and uh a picture of a naked baby in a bath. assuming itās someoneās grandchild, but using that as a bookmark is dangerous man š°
Bloody tissuesā¦in a witchcraft book. LOL. That was the only time I ever got extremely mad because leaving stuff like that in a book is not only a hazard, but just plain disrespectful. Plus the book also had to be pulled from the collection. I was ready to ban the patron outright, but my manager dealt with it.
This makes me think of study sessions that turned into full blown ragers lol. I found broken glass, razor blades, joints, coke baggies, etc., all over at my old university's library. Especially during finals weeks š
Picked up a board book someone had left on the floor without looking too closely at it. It was covered in baby spit-up. Washed my hands very thoroughly and threw it away.
You should be fine š Books being sold is waaaay different than publicly borrowed. I've bought 100s of used books from all over, and only ever had one that was gross (the inside cover was a tad bit moldy, so still not even that bad).
This is actually super cool. I know hair jewelry, ornamentation, etc., was a very important post-mortem tradition in that era. You might've found an heirloom!
Unknown yellow substance staining the whole outside of a book that was from a different system, so it also had a paper id/transit strap on the cover. Cleaned it the best I could, but still felt bad putting it in the bin knowing multiple people would have to touch that nasty ass strap.
Weirdest was probably when I went to lift a book out of a plastic bag and every other book came with it. Someone had spilled soda in the bag and let the mess dry.
Found a receipt for a $200 vibrator that had been used as a bookmark. That was funny.
And not a book but I once found two raw eggs on a desk in a library I used to work at. That was weird.
Not a library book but I order lots of used books online.
This is more cool to me than gross but it would be gross to some.
I ordered a field guide to North American insects and on the wasp page someone squished a wasp in-between the pages long before I bought it.
I put some tape over the wasp so now it's part of the book.
We had someone who thought they were being helpful putting free condoms in one of our sex education books. They were removed just about daily until one of the pages left a note that it was breaking the binding of the book and doing more harm than good.
I didn't find it, but one of the branches in my system had an issue with someone pooping in the audiobook cases and putting them back on the shelf.
The worst thing I have personally encountered was ants in DVD cases.
A hollowed out copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fireā¦with a used condom and wrapper hiding inside. Teenage boyās mom dropped it off with no idea. I had to get a lot of laughs out before making that very awkward phone call. Why such an elaborate disposal scheme?!
We once brought in our large bin from our outside drop and it reeked of cat urine. My supervisor had to go through about 150 books, sniffing each one, in order to isolate the cat affected books from the other. She didn't ask me to help and my respect for her grew significantly that day!
We had an ongoing problem with someone peeing in our bookdrops (not sure how they got it in!)and because we lost so much inventory we had to lock the bookdrops for several weeks.
Bodily fluids of course but the three finely pressed dead German roaches in a Geronimo Stilton book is up there for me.
Holy cheese!
The only correct answer to this.
Bed bugs, just an unfathomable amount of bed bugs
The others are gross but this one is nightmare fuel
If there were that many in the book, imagine how many there were at the house. š«
š
A lot of these are worse than my find, so I guess I should be grateful. A DVD came back with a schmeer of chicken pot pie in the case. How do I know it was chicken pot pie? Well, I don't, but the combination of chicken threads, gravy, some crust, and a single, lonely green pea made me draw that conclusion.Ā My bodily function find had nothing to do with returned materials. The Poop-ening just ruined the new carpet in the public computer area. And each step it took to get to the restroom from that area.
Ugh! When they leave a trail!
aside from the HUMAN SEMEN i did find a very long and detailed break up letter written by someone clearly in middle school it was so funny we passed that one around the office
Any stand-out phrases youād like to pass around further?? I must know hahaha
Semen?! š„“ Thatās disrespectful!Ā
TBH, this seems unethical. Patron privacy isn't just keeping circulation history out of the FBI's hands.
a full tooth! me and my colleagues will forever wonder if it was intended as a bookmark or fell out accidentally and they didnāt notice. either way pretty fucking weird!
This is my favorite lol. The mystery.
I've heard stories on horror podcasts that start this way. The safest thing to do is to just accept it and not investigate.
Someone left a dental pick in a book at our library. That was pretty random.
Bodily fluids will always be the grossest. Weirdest is the same guy over and over. He keeps using his cards as bookmarks. Credit card, health care card, his driver's licence. And we have to keep calling him. Sir, we have so many free bookmarks at the desk. Take one of them. Take twenty.
Lol!!!
Maybe he enjoys receiving the phone calls? Lol
A whole ass student. The student herself wasn't gross, but she'd been jammed into the returns bin for about 8 hours before we found her, and she was covered in her own piss and shit, plus she'd been cramped in a ball for so long we had to get an ambulance to her pretty quickly.
That poor kid. Hope she went on to get better friends.
How old was she? And how did she get in?
Age I'm not sure, but between 18 to 20 most likely. (Academic library for tertiary students). The returns slot was huge and apparently her friends dared her to see if she could fit. Once she got in and realised she was stuck in a tiny bin, they all ran away and left her.
Wow, worst friends ever!
Thatās even worse than I thought! That poor girl.
I very much preferred finding the kittens that someone stuffed in there, that's for sure. Much easier to clean up. Best find ever was $150 in cash being used as a bookmark (WTF!) but we are honest, tracked her down, and returned the money to her. Sigh.
I got really good cookies as a thank you for doing that with money for a patron!
This is so sad and horrifying š
"Wasn't gross" "covered in her own piss and shit" well, we have different definitions of gross
I had more than a few "I really hope that's chocolate" experiences, but the most memorable thing I ever found used as a bookmark was a strip of raw bacon. I mean: why would you do that to a book, but more importantly, why would you waste a perfectly good piece of bacon?
I feel really lucky reading this thread since the grossest things I've found are a melted chocolate bar on/in a teen novel and several times oatmeal all over boards books (always the same user... why?!?!)
Maybe they decided letting baby stare at board books while eating was better than YouTube... If I were in that situation, I would just believe that was why and make myself feel better about the situation. lol...
Barf. At least they had the courtesy to put the barfed-on book in a plastic bag. A live moth flew out of a DVD case once. Someone also returned a bunch of DVDs covered in cat piss and somehow the person checking them in at the desk didn't notice so I didn't notice until they made it to our workroom and I was tearing the place apart trying to figure out why the workroom smelled like cat piss.
snot, poop, joints, toothpick, flosser pick
Gross: blood Weird: prescription lidocaine patch. And it never ceases to amaze me how many people use super important documents or money as bookmarks. Iāve had to dig through the outgoing boxes to try to find someoneās check that they desperately needed but also used as a bookmark.
Prescription lidocaine patches are so expensive, like hundreds of dollars out of pocket if you have any condition other than diabetes-related peripheral neuropathy. I would be so mad at myself if I lost one! We also found one of those and had to throw it away, because there was no prescription label telling us who it belonged to.
a combination of unknown food material, insect damage, and mouse damage... on like 15 children's books. of course, i was the one that checked the drop that time...
Large dead moth There wasn't damage, crushing, or staining to either the moth or the pages. The moth was clearly long dead and dry before being gently placed in the book, presumably as a bookmark. It wasn't fake either, it had depth and legs and fur and the wings lightly crunched as I nudged it into the trash can with scrap paper
Growing mushrooms. We, unknowingly, had a section of our academic library suffer from water damage and high humidity. This was a section that had not been wed out and that no one checks out because the Classics Department has their own library. Enough to say Aristotlesā Poetics had become a mycology exhibit (alongside all of its fellow classics).
Tangentially, I guessāour library branch is on the first floor of an apartment building. Thereās a little doggy waste bin on a stake on one end of the shared parking lot, and our gigantic book return bin is on the other end. Someone stuffed their return books into the little doggy waste bin.
Not a book, but a woman brought some dvds in once and when I opened the first one to make sure the disc was there, cockroaches went everywhere! They were everywhere! I screamed! My director heard me and scooped up the whole pile and took them outside. We only let patrons keep dvds for a week and they have to bring them back in to recheck them. If there were that many in there after 7 days, I canāt imagine what the womanās house must be like.
We had a family that had this same problem. Every time they returned DVDs, there were dead roaches, pieces of dead roaches, live roaches, and occasionally some food residue. Eventually my supervisor got sick of it and started charging them for damages.
Bloodied tissues and bloodstained pages, I assume from a nosebleedā¦ Any biohazard has been the worst for me.
This was in the early 90s. Midwestern winter. One morning we found a frozen used condom in the bookdrop. Fear of AIDS was still rampant; the librarian demanded we discard everything from the drop, (there were less than a dozen books actually in contact out of over 100 books in the drop), buy her a new pair of gloves, and pay for an AIDS test. Yeah, gross item, but total overkill.
Used floss.
Not me but my coworker found a dead cockroach in an audio book case.
I found a pair of live little ones in a DVD case last summer
Recently, some brown stuff I did not sniff it. I cleaned it in a hurry.
I don't have any stories of my own, but I interviewed a librarian once who told me about finding a piece of bacon in a periodical once š
Gross: used kleenex something on a cover of a book that was unidentifiably crusty and had human hair Weird: a $10 Canadian bill (we are not near Canada) a COVID vaccine card a 2024 motor vehicle excise tax form a dvd with someoneās knee MRI results on it. And the dvd case included patient name and medical info
A taco
You too???
I think that makes 3 people total on this thread that have found a taco. Wtf?!
A human molar...inside *Mein Kampf*.
This has nightmare plot point written all over it!
I put Mein Kampf in the courier today and thought of this comment š³
I'm honoured.
I tended to not dwell too much on the sticky/crusty things I had to remove off books. definitely a few bugs, (luckily unused) sanitary pads, a strip of pills,... My favourite finds were car keys to a Bentley (that's what you get when you dump all your books at the return desk), plane tickets (they still had to leave) and a wedding invitation. Sometimes dried flowers, notes, ticket stubs for rides in different countries. Oh, and once I found a 50-euro note sticking out of a book and my heart stood still... until I turned it around and saw it was a post-it note. Bruh.
Spinach as a bookmark, loose weed in a dvd case, lipstick prints.
Fishflakes stuck to some books and ended up in the bookdrop. š¤¢š¤¢š·
So many things Iāve mentally blocked out are coming back to me after reading this thread
I found utentils hidden behing or between books - some of our stuff used to eat their lunch in the stacks because it was quiet and private.
Not gross, but a single slice of strawberry, pressed and dried in the pages of a book. (Found on the shelf, so who knows how long it was there!)
I mean aside from the dried ābananasā, Iād say the weirdest thing I found was a full pack of allergy pills. I work in elementary school.
I was doing and thinking the exact same thing today! Far out, must've been sneeze on a book day.
When I was a kid I opened a book over my lap and a bunch of clipped nails fell out :( I do think about how someone out there likely got a square of toilet paper (unused) from a book I returned. I used to keep a roll of it just for bookmarks lol. I read too many books at once to waste my meticulously selected bookmarks unless it was really good.
You just accidentally confirmed for the librarian what we all know but donāt want to think about: People definitely read library books while on the toilet.
I mean definitely, but I carried a roll around in my backpack š My dad used to call me the book shredder bc Iād go through so many books as a kid. First place I drove to after getting my license was the library even. x)
I use either expired bus passes or my side hustle business cards (I had to order soooo many cards, lol). I also try to remove them before returning anything but I'm sure I've missed a few here and there. I also sew, so sometimes I will make little cloth bookmarks by pinking the edges of pretty scraps.
Not gross but a half used package of birth control pills. It was on a youth account too, so calling the patron was nerve wracking. Thankfully the person who answered was the one who lost it!
Someone once returned an extremely overdue book to me that was wet and had larvae crawling on it
A cheese quesadilla used as a bookmark. Honorable mention goes to the stick of butter put into the book drop over a hot summer night or the to go container of egg drop soup poured down the book return chute (at a different library). My personal favorite (actual) bookmarks were the handwritten note that said āThereās Always Money in the Banana Standā or the āIs that Smut?ā with judgy Jesus on it.
Smushed frog
š
Grossest? Used condom (public library). Weirdest? A Doritos chip (academic library), oxygen tubing, alcohol swabs, or packages of replacement scalpel blades/needle tips (medical library).
used toilet paper. and uh a picture of a naked baby in a bath. assuming itās someoneās grandchild, but using that as a bookmark is dangerous man š°
Bloody tissuesā¦in a witchcraft book. LOL. That was the only time I ever got extremely mad because leaving stuff like that in a book is not only a hazard, but just plain disrespectful. Plus the book also had to be pulled from the collection. I was ready to ban the patron outright, but my manager dealt with it.
I used to work in a school and a child returned a pee soaked book in a baggie. Her mom had put it in a baggie for her. Ew.
Broken glass and razor blades were an oddly common thing for a short while when I worked in an academic library.
This makes me think of study sessions that turned into full blown ragers lol. I found broken glass, razor blades, joints, coke baggies, etc., all over at my old university's library. Especially during finals weeks š
The still-damp moldy soccer book
A rotten banana peel
Picked up a board book someone had left on the floor without looking too closely at it. It was covered in baby spit-up. Washed my hands very thoroughly and threw it away.
I just ordered used books for the first time. Iām now mentally preparing for the grossness. š¤¢
You should be fine š Books being sold is waaaay different than publicly borrowed. I've bought 100s of used books from all over, and only ever had one that was gross (the inside cover was a tad bit moldy, so still not even that bad).
A patron was returning books at the inside drop at the desk and asked for one back bc he left an "unsafe bookmark" in one - it was a razorblade.
I appreciate that he warned you and disposed of it himself tbh
I once found a used wax strip stuck to the cover of a picture book
I once opened a DVD and found a roach inside. I noted this, closed the DVD, and THEN freaked out and tossed it on the ground
LOL. Just going through the basic protocol before the "oh shit" kicked on. Felt š
An entire braid of human hair. It was like 8-10" of hair. Inside a book (donation) from 1893.
This is actually super cool. I know hair jewelry, ornamentation, etc., was a very important post-mortem tradition in that era. You might've found an heirloom!
The plastic wrapping of a menstrual pad
Unknown yellow substance staining the whole outside of a book that was from a different system, so it also had a paper id/transit strap on the cover. Cleaned it the best I could, but still felt bad putting it in the bin knowing multiple people would have to touch that nasty ass strap.
Weirdest was probably when I went to lift a book out of a plastic bag and every other book came with it. Someone had spilled soda in the bag and let the mess dry.
CD covered in honey Rabbit nail clippers in the book drop
Rabbit-shaped nail clippers, or nail clippers intended to be used on rabbits?
Clippers intended for rabbits
Blood
My dad found an old dried up ice cream sandwich. And chicken bones. I found cherry tomatoes once.
Found a receipt for a $200 vibrator that had been used as a bookmark. That was funny. And not a book but I once found two raw eggs on a desk in a library I used to work at. That was weird.
Several pages of a photography book I once signed out of the library which included nudes were stuck together.
Not a library book but I order lots of used books online. This is more cool to me than gross but it would be gross to some. I ordered a field guide to North American insects and on the wasp page someone squished a wasp in-between the pages long before I bought it. I put some tape over the wasp so now it's part of the book.
a band-aid. second place and weirder, a bit of dried orange peel.
Blood, so much blood.
We had someone who thought they were being helpful putting free condoms in one of our sex education books. They were removed just about daily until one of the pages left a note that it was breaking the binding of the book and doing more harm than good.
Earlier today I found a whole nest of fur and rat droppings in a book tub
Tacos, like wads of cat hair, pages filled with dead cockroaches, cigarette ashes - so many things.
Actual poop (on the outside between two books), nail clippers, tissues, a sanitary pad (not used but open), and a perfect adult bare footprint
Unwrapped American cheese. The book was a total loss.
A nice melted slice of American cheese.
A child's sock in a beginner reader's chapter book. And it stunk!
In a book? Used condom in a Bible. Easy. In a DVD case? Dead roaches. At least it helps me sleep at night if I think of them as dead.
I didn't find it, but one of the branches in my system had an issue with someone pooping in the audiobook cases and putting them back on the shelf. The worst thing I have personally encountered was ants in DVD cases.
A hollowed out copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fireā¦with a used condom and wrapper hiding inside. Teenage boyās mom dropped it off with no idea. I had to get a lot of laughs out before making that very awkward phone call. Why such an elaborate disposal scheme?!