San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Items left in books become tiny treasures
A decade's worth of love notes, photographs, scribbled lists and other ephemera left behind in the pages of books returned to the Oakland Public Library have been carefully curated for an exhibition opening this week.
Over the past 10 years, librarian Sharon McKellar has collected and digitally archived the items, which provide a tiny window into the lives of those who left them behind — sometimes routine, but sometimes funny, charming, poignant or downright baffling.
McKellar has blogged about the items on the Oakland Public Library's website for years, but it wasn't until November, when the agency launched a new website, that she was able to neatly categorize the collection for people to browse through online. There you'll find love letters, birthday cards, to-do lists, recipes, children's drawings and family photos.
Starting Wednesday, people can see some of these items in-person in a display box on the first floor of the main library at 125 14th St. in Oakland.
“It's just really intriguing to think about how each of those things landed here in one of our libraries in some way or another,” McKellar, who has worked at the library for 19 years, told The Chronicle.
“It feels like you're really getting a glimpse of the community of Oakland,” she said.
When the library was preparing to launch a new website a decade ago, McKellar said she was brainstorming ways to feature “fun” content. Inspired by Found magazine, which publishes random items found by people, McKellar decided to put out a call for library staff to send her things they have found in books.
Items that reveal a person's identification or address are returned to them and not included in the collection.
“I had my own little collection, and I knew a lot of my friends who also worked for the library had their own little collection, so I just thought that could be fun,” she said.
For McKellar, collecting these items is like trying to solve an unsolvable puzzle, she said: What's the story behind them? How did they land in a library book? Who and where are the people in these photographs?
“I always think about how some of these things that feel more mundane and uninteresting could be really important items to somebody,” she said.
Some of the notes are silly and heartwarming, while others are intimate and personal. For example, one note appears to be written by someone who experienced a heartbreak, writing “Translation: When you broke my heart … you freed me. Thank you.”
Another is written in Spanish
Librarian Sharon McKellar hangs receipts, ticket stubs and other travel-related items in a display case at the Oakland Public Library. The items, found in the pages of returned books, are among notes, photographs, lists and other items on display.
A love note scrawled on the back of a postcard to commemorate an anniversary is among the items that were left in Oakland library books and displayed in an exhibit that opened last week.
and says, “Are you my friend? Yes or no or maybe? From Ana. Oakland, CA. 2/26/ 09.”
In all the years that McKellar collected and posted items online, no one who has either written a note or is the owner of an item had ever reached out to her — until last month.
Jamee Longacre of Concord said she was scrolling through Imgur, an online image host, in July when she saw a screenshot of a Twitter thread about the Oakland collection. She leaned into the computer screen and said to herself, “That looks like my handwriting! Wait a minute, is that my handwriting?”
Longacre had written “BRAT,” referring to the popular diet recommended for
Sharon McKellar, Oakland librarian children with constipation (bananas, rice, apples, toast). “Constipation in babies!!” Longacre wrote in red ink.
A week later, she read an article about the collection and reached out to McKellar.
Longacre doesn't remember when she wrote the note, but she said may have written it to a friend or co-worker.
“I kind of either drive people nuts for this or they love me for it, but I write everything down on Post-Its,” she said. “I don't believe this was for myself, I think I wrote it for a friend or a co-worker and I must have written it with advice.”
Still, she said, she has no clue how it ended up at an Oakland library because she only visits libraries in Contra Costa County.
“It just made me laugh to myself,” she said. “Just to see that there's someone else out there like me doing this and to see the creativity . ... Each of those little notes have a story.” Monica Mehta of Oakland
also recognized one of the notes she wrote to her then-6year-old daughter six years ago. Beth Gousman, a librarian at the Montclair Elementary School library, where Mehta's daughters went to school, emailed her, saying, “That's not your handwriting on the Alisha note, is it?” Mehta told The Chronicle.
As soon as she saw it, memories came flooding back. Mehta and her husband were getting ready to go out on a date night when she wrote a note for one of her daughters, who was having nightmares at the time, and slipped it onto her pillow.
“Alisha. Sweet dreams my love bug. Have a good night and sleep well. Love, Mama & Daddy, xox,” Mehta wrote in red ink on a yellow, heartshaped paper.
It was one of many notes Mehta said she used to write to her daughters, often tucking them into their lunch bags. The fact that her note ended up in the collection didn't come as a surprise, she said, because her daughters would regularly walk to the Montclair library branch after school. “It was really like their second home.”
But seeing the note was a sweet surprise, she said.
“As parents, we have so many of these little moments that just go by in time, and so seeing this was really special because it just made me remember this specific moment — a time when she was very little and now she's almost a teenager,” she said. “It was just a nice memory to have.”
“It's just really intriguing to think about how each of those things landed here in one of our libraries in some way or another.”