Well, I came across something unusual while working through the weekend’s library-book haul; in a book of short stories by Annie Proulx (about 3/4′s through Brokeback Mountain, as a matter of fact), somebody happened to leave this:

Though dry (and flat), the flowers (lilac) still have a strong fragrance, kind of sweet. Almost like hay.

Another book I noticed today (Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle) happened to contain leftovers: a paystub belonging to another library patron. I’m sure such a document could be used for nefarious purposes… SIN scamming, identity theft — just the sorts of things you might find in one of Dick’s stories, appropriately enough.

Anyhow, it doesn’t take long before the imagination envisions lonely readers leaving clues in their favourite library books, all the while hoping that a bookish bosom buddy would pick up the traces, piece them together, and maybe make contact (amorous, indubitably).

Alternatively, this could become a new adventure-hobby for the literary set — instead of geo caches, why not create biblio-caches? Directions or clues leading to caches could be crafted so as to only make sense after the reader got through the book in which they were hidden. For example, if I wanted to leave directions to a biblio-cache in Kevin Patterson’s The Water In Between (one of the past weekend’s reads, highly recommended), I might conceal a message within the volume that reads “follow the songlines;” the reader would learn while reading The Water In Between that Songlines is in fact the title of a book by Bruce Chatwin, and upon checking Songlines out he would discover the corresponding cache (and possibly another clue, leading to another book). The caches could even function as recommendations, leading interested readers to similarly interesting books.

It seems to me that there are good places to hide caches & clues in library books… such as in the pockets inside the front covers (unused now due to electronic filing systems, yet still ubiquitous), or possibly stuck behind dust jackets. Of course, the brave may simply leave their traces between the pages, where they may be easily discovered by both lay-readers and cache-hunters alike.