A little more than knowledge was found inside an Indiana public library book this week when an employee cracked open a donated hardback and discovered a gun inside.
Tucked into a hollowed-out space in a book called “Outerbridge Reach,” a novel by Robert Stone, the gun was a .31-caliber, single shot, A.S.M. brand with a gold, wooden handle.
"Somebody just opened it up and said, 'Oh my,'” Porter County Public Library assistant director Phyllis Nelson told a local paper.
Scores of books are donated to the library each month without record, so it will not be possible to know who dropped off the book or when it happened, Nelson said.
However, Nelson said she did contact local police, who were able to find out that the gun—which is being held as evidence—had not been stolen.
This is not the first time a gun has been found inside a book donated the Valparaiso branch, according to reports.
And a gun may not even be the strangest thing ever discovered inside a library book.
Almost 10 years ago, a librarian from Santa Fe, N.M. was looking through a 19th-century book on Civil War medicine when she found an envelope that read “scabs from vaccination of W.B. Yarrington’s children” on the outside.
Researchers from all over the country were later led to believe that the envelope may have contained samples of smallpox, which at the time was kept in just two laboratories throughout the world.
Discoveries like this have led several readers to create blogs about the things they find inside old books.
One blog, called Enclosures, showcases the poems, pictures, and newspaper clippings found inside secondhand books.