Preposition-happy misprints

Take a look at these two titles, and tell me what's wrong with them:

I didn't even notice at first, myself. It's amazing to me how the human brain will seek out familiar and "sensible" phrases, sometimes without even a noticeable hiccup over such minute errors as these.

I have a tendency to scan through the titles of our new acquisitions, and serials naturally catch the eye. Out of the seven to ten books total in the series, two of them had misprinted titles on their spines. Statistically speaking, I think that's what might qualify as "abysmal."

The funny thing is, the titles are printed accurately on the cover. I'm betting somebody at Berg's publishing house was in trouble when the mistake was discovered.

400 babies

Okay, the title of this post exaggerates a bit. I did not find 4,000 babies anywhere in the book stacks, much less in a book. My department did, however, find about 14 babies--babies that were cast in plaster and frequently deformed, like demonic, little Kewpie dolls.

They weren't all so incomplete as the example above. Some of them had all four limbs. Some of them had no limbs. And one of them was just a decapitated head--we never recovered the body.

They started appearing during the Spring Quarter of 2009, scattered throughout the book stacks on seemingly random shelves. We found them all in about a week. One of them almost killed one of our staff with a deadly blow to the head when it toppled from a row of compact shelving (shelving that moves).

I ran into a friend of a friend who claimed to have a roommate who knew why the plaster babies existed, which was ostensibly that they were part of an art project. Now, I've seen some pretty conceptual art (and appreciated a fraction of it), but I can't fathom what our artist(s) might be attempting to convey with these creeptastic creations. Unless their intent was just to give me the creeps. In which case:  job somewhat done. I'm mostly just confused.

After that one crazy week at the end of the school year, we appeared to have outlasted the plaster onslaught. Until the spring of this year. The same week. The same pint-sized horrors, and in roughly the same quantity. And I now have no clues as to who the perpetrators are or why. I'm somewhat anxious to see if the same deformed figurines will make an appearance for a third year running. We'll probably run out of storage space for them eventually.

Faster, Higher, Stronger

In 2008, I had the good fortune to lay my hands on a pair of tickets to the Olympic games in Beijing. Sadly, this was in October of that year--a couple of months after the event--when I found them in a book I was scanning. They were quite pretty!

I felt a bit sorry for whoever left them there, as I'm sure if I ever made it to the Olympic games (athlete or no), I'd want to keep those tickets. I also wonder if the original owner even got to use them, as they didn't show any signs of having been torn or anything indicating that they'd been processed.


Disclaimer:  The above image is not a photo of either of the actual tickets I found, nor is it my property. I am only using it as an example to illustrate my find.

Books of a feather

Today we have a brand new find: bird feathers. I kid you not. There were three or four of them total, slipped between the pages of a volume on erotic photography--the title of which escapes me.

I identified at least two of the feathers. The first was roughly a foot long, from quill to tip, and I believe was a hawk's feather. The second was a few inches shorter and looked to have once belonged to a turkey.

I'm not sure whether the fact that they were real makes more or less sense here. Nor do I really care to speculate on the connection between the subject matter of the book and the feathers themselves.