The vintage connoisseur is not limited to the collection of old things. The true connoisseur will also collect the stories of old people.

When I said I wasn’t sure about taking the time to go to a Friends of the Library book sale last weekend, my eighty-year-old neighbor, Mrs. Boaz, a dependable font of discriminating local gossip and entertaining tales about, well, everything, told me a story. (This was less than two weeks after she had advised me to reclaim—immediately—an old trunk of mysterious provenance from my mother-in-law’s garage; she had just seen an Antiques Roadshow rerun in which an old trunk turned out to be worth $140,000. It would have been worth significantly more, of course, had the owner not refinished it in order to bring it on TV.)

The library book sale story concerned the (now deceased) mother-in-law of the sister of one of her daughters-in-law, a thoroughly unhappy and miserly woman somewhere, I think, in Texas. When she was suffering from dementia and preparing to move to an assisted living facility, the daughter-in-law’s sister’s husband started packing up the house, boxing shelves of books to donate to the local library book sale. Hers was not any great library; there were, Mrs. Boaz explained disdainfully, a great many Reader’s Digest books. Nothing valuable—except the sister’s husband discovered, upon flipping through one volume he was interested in reading, that the center had been cut out. Instead of pages, the book was stuffed with cash. As you might imagine, the sister’s husband then took care to flip through every other book on the premises, those already packed in boxes for the sale, those still on the shelves throughout the house. He also had the house locks changed (the old woman’s other son, an unstable ne’er-do-well, found out about the books and started tearing the place apart—pulling appliances from the walls and digging around the foundation of the house).

Reader’s Digest Treasury. Photo courtesy of http://www.mikesowden.org.

The hidden money was not a symptom of the woman’s dementia. She had, apparently, been carving into books and stashing money inside for years. Maybe to keep it from the ne’er-do-well son, who knows? But then she lost her mind, and the other son, the sister’s husband, had he not been a literary man, might just as well never have discovered her savings and sent all of it off to be sold in the church activities hall, two for $5.

In the end, there were significantly fewer books to donate to the library book sale but tens of thousands of dollars more for the old woman’s health care than the good son anticipated. The hollowed-out library was more valuable than ever and absolutely worthless all at the same time.

People secret money away all sorts of ways all the time. Was it really beyond the pale that someone—I—might find a small fortune inside a secondhand copy (in new condition) of Ron Rash’s Serena? Considering the plethora of platitudes about the invaluable value of literature, the new worlds waiting to be discovered inside the pages of a book, etc. etc., could there be a more fitting place to find buried treasure? More to the point: Did I think, Mrs. Boaz demanded, everyone’s son took the time to flip through their demented mother’s cheap books?

Do I think every son flips through his demented mother’s cheap books?

I went to the sale. Professor Vintage lives in the land of retirees; book clubs and beach reading abound. The sale was stocked with popular titles. Mary Higgins Clark, James Patterson, and John Grisham had entire tables to themselves. There were not a lot of old books—one small round table in a dark corner labeled “antique.” The most interesting of which was a Mayhew’s London in dark blue cloth from (approximately) midcentury (the 20^th). But who am I to assess value? What a loss if the son had sniffed at Reader’s Digest editions.

Finding treasure where you least expect it, such is the excitement of even the ubiquitous library book sale run by literary minded retirees in the church activities hall. In the secondhand economy, there is always the opportunity for adventure, for great good fortune at every turn. Perhaps even in the middle of a Mary Higgins Clark or a James Patterson, two for $5.