142. Found: a mini book of lists
An unexpected treasure borrowed from the library.
Dear Reader,
I was thrilled when I received this e-mail last month from my friend Mary B in Austin, Texas, about something her husband Jim1 had found:
Our library saves things that patrons leave in returned books (bookmarks, photos, postcards, ribbons, etc.) and hang those abandoned things for owners to claim and/or others to pick from.
Jim found a small paper book and rescued it.
There are pages of lists inside.
When Jim showed me this book, we were standing in the stacks. He pulled it from his back pocket and said "look what I found".... and at first, I was so taken with the Mini on the front and back, and then I opened it and saw all of the lists, and we both said your name. I said, "Rebecca would love this!!!"
Mary has called the book the ‘Mini Book of Lists’ – MBoL for short – and Reader, Rebecca does love it.
Mary and Jim’s local library – the Hampton Branch at Oak Hill – is one of 22 branches of The Austin Public Library. Mary tells me this:
What’s funny about Oak Hill, a little area of its own within Austin proper, is that there are tons of oaks but not so many hills. There might be two or three of note, but other than that, it’s flat.
This is good news for Mary and Jim, because they don’t drive to the library, they cycle. In her newsletter
Mary publishes the ever-growing tally of miles saved as part of her fabulous routine of ‘resourcefully beating high gas prices and inflation in the smallest ways’ by riding her bike instead of driving her car. In the 707 days of her project so far, Mary and Jim have saved 5,237.6 miles by using pedal power to accomplish their transport needs to get to work, the shops, the library and to run errands.Mary has been kind enough to provide me with a description of her ride to the library – a round trip of 6.4 miles – which takes 20 minutes one-way, or 30 minutes there and back if she’s going as fast as she can.
We ride through the Westcreek Greenway which is a lovely, flat path through a woods; the path is a mix of gravel, hard-packed soil, and mulch. It’s one of our favorite parts of the trip.
After the Greenway, we ride through suburbia, lovely established neighborhoods, lots of families, a neighborhood park + swimming pool + playground for the kiddos, and tennis courts. The streets are tree-lined, lots of kids and retired folks, it’s really nice.
Jim had found the MBoL on a piece of yarn tacked to a wall where the library staff hang things found in books. The clothes line of found objects is located in a hallway away from the library proper and near the room where all the books are sorted that are returned through the book drop, something which makes for a violent and perilous life for ephemera hiding between the pages. Someone had been wise enough to keep the MBoL and make it available for people to see.
The small notebook which I carry everywhere is 124mm x 88mm, or ‘passport size’.
The MBoL, though, is a slightly larger, slimmer volume measuring 140mm x 100mm, which had started life with 40 pages – or ten individual folded, stapled sheets of paper. Now, though, the back page is missing, and as a result the remainder of that sheet of paper – the front page – is peeping jauntily out of the edge of the book. Each page is ruled with 14 lines, plus a separate date section at the top.
The cover is matte recycled pulped card, thinner than board but a little thicker than paper, and there’s plenty going on on both the front and the back. Permanent decoration on the front takes the form of a printed line drawing of an old-style Mini with the following Thai text beneath:
ถนนคนเดินเชียงใหม่
These words – expressed in Latin script as T̄hnn khn dein cheīyngh̄ım̀ – mean Chiang Mai Walking Street.
The same drawing of a Mini is reproduced smaller on the back cover, with the same text – this time in English – underneath. There’s also a tiny logo which looks like a stylised elephant and the Thai name ‘Praew’. I’ve drawn a blank trying to identify the logo using Google Lens, but it’s a cutie, don’t you think?
Both the front and back covers have additional decorative elements in the form of rubber stamp impressions.
A circular such mark on the front shows 01 JUL 2017, with the Thai text above it reading ‘reorder’. Beneath that is the number 50200, which represents a postal district in Chiang Mai.
Until I met the MBoL – thanks both to Mary and US Postal Service – I had never come across the term ‘walking street’, and some online research told me that rather than an actual address – such as ‘High Street’ or ‘Fifth Avenue’ – a walking street is generally the name given to a night-time street market.
This website describes ten of Chiang Mai’s walking streets, and I found that two of them have the same postcode – 50200 – which is shown on that circular stamp on the MBoL’s front cover.
Here’s one of them:
Tha Phae Walking Street is one of the most popular places where people from all walks of life come to do shopping or take leisurely walks at nightfall.
Open 5pm – 10.30pm Sunday
The second rubber stamp impression, this one applied at a jaunty angle to the top of the back cover, looks like this:
I had assumed that a quick Google search would have told me plenty about Pepperdine University, Chiang Mai, Thailand, yet no such bricks-and-mortar institution exists.
Pepperdine University is a private research university affiliated with the Churches of Christ with its main campus in Los Angeles County, California. Pepperdine’s main campus consists of 830 acres overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu, California. Founded by entrepreneur George Pepperdine in South Los Angeles in 1937, the school expanded to Malibu in 1972.
Taken from Wikipedia.
In addition to its current offerings of international programs in Buenos Aires, London, Heidelberg, Florence and Blonay Saint-Légier, such programs have in the past taken place in Paris, Madrid, Johannesburg, Tegucigalpa, Brisbane, Chiang Mai, Hong Kong, Uganda and Tokyo. However, the latest edition of the Academic Catalog for Pepperdine’s Seaver College of Letters, Arts and Sciences available online makes no mention of any current international program in Chiang Mai, with the only evidence to hand of any such programme having existed in 2017 being those two rubber stamps on the cover of the MBoL.
None of the geographical locations which I’d turned up in my online research is very close to Austin, Texas. Reader, the MBoL had travelled some distance even before it had landed at the library in Oak Hill, and now that it’s here on a short visit to south-east UK it’s racked up even more miles. Soon, of course, it will be winging its way back to Austin. ✈️
In recent years, I’m ashamed to say, my own library habit has lapsed. As a child I loved spending time at the library in my local town, where I’d set up camp for hours on a red plastic chair to look at all the books I could fit on my lap at a time.
When I spent time as an au-pair in Germany my young charges and I would spend an hour or more at the Bücherei every week. Seven-year-old P would pore over bound volumes of comics, while S would stuff a basket with as many volumes of teen fiction as would fit, and would try to convince the librarian that she needed to borrow more than the prescribed four-volume limit2 because ‘I am very intelligent and can read very fast.’
She wasn’t wrong on either point, and Reader, that kid was nine.
I’d spend my weekly library hour reading the tiny selection of English language books piecemeal and hoping the kids wouldn’t notice. Those two – by far the strictest officers the language police had ever recruited – took my German language learning very seriously, and given the hard time they would give me whenever I addressed the family cat in English I knew I had to keep my library activities with contraband words hush hush stumm.
The Hampton Branch library at Oak Hill and its contents are important to Mary and Jim, and Mary, as a former employee at the branch, has seen first-hand how treasures like the MBoL are discovered.
I was part of a rotating task of all employees, though some of us would spring at the chance more than others to gather all the books from the book drops, and process the books into circulation.
In the process of taking books off the floor from the book drop and putting them on a cart, often things would fall out of the books: bookmarks, postcards, grocery lists, envelopes, anything that one would use for a bookmark. Someone decided to use the MBoL for a bookmark and I’m 100% sure that it fell out of a book when it (the book) was being moved from the book drop to the cart, or during the scanning of the book back into circulation. I loved that part of the job.
Given that her notebook had been found there, I imagine that the owner of the MBoL – I’ll call her Emma – was, like Mary, no stranger to the library.
Considering its background, then, it’s rather lovely that Emma’s notes on the very first page of the MBoL contain a reference to a book.
These jottings are about a child in Emma’s life – one interested in basketball and books. Would I, as an eleven-year-old, have sought out Becoming by Michelle Obama? I would have thought this book better suited to adults – but no, I gather there is an edition available which has been adapted for young readers. In its description of the young reader edition, Amazon.com pitches it for a reading age of 9-12 years.
Apart from one recipe reference – pea & spinach carbonara from eatingwell.com, for the record – the first five pages of the MBoL contain random notes.
physical print out
digital for S
retirement account
touch base in 6 mos
email bb pic
set up food exploring
GB – homework
Those early pages also include an intriguing diagram of a sports court or pitch showing a game involving a number of players, and a score sheet listing data for nine named individuals.
The rest of the book is a whole library of lists: useful data to which I am sure our list-writer – someone Mary tells me she imagines as ‘organized and thoughtful’ – would have referred more than once. For instance, names of another two delicious-sounding dishes are jotted down, and I’m sure Emma would have wanted to find these again.
Some of Emma’s lists stretch to three columns across a two-page spread, but often a one-page shopping list is positioned adjacent to a meal plan on the opposite page.
And look, Emma spends time with children:
A few pages later is a list of kid-friendly finger-food destined for snacks and lunch for Felix:
Is this Felix’s own handwriting, I wonder?
Proving Mary’s assertion that Emma is both organized and thoughtful, at the very back of the book is a whole page of gift ideas for over a dozen people. Here are my favourites:
Alamo drafthouse
(The Alamo drafthouse cinema has a branch in Austin, so maybe Emma was going to be buying tickets.)
Gumball bank, playdough slime
Art supplies
Taco cat goat cheese pizza
That last entry rendered me horrorstruck, and I was grateful for Emma’s sake that this item hadn’t made it onto any of her meal-planning or grocery lists. I turned to Google, and, to my relief, it turns out that Taco cat goat cheese pizza is a game and not a meal.)
#phew 😅
In a previous post about a lost shopping list I had explored some differences in US English and British English food vocabulary, focusing in particular on whether the plural form of shrimp is shrimp (US English) or shrimps (British English).
Some of Emma’s shopping lists had me asking some questions, too. What, for instance, is an English cucumber? Cucumber is cucumber, isn’t it?
Here’s what Eating Well has to say on the matter.
I recognise both types simply as ‘cucumber’, the one on the right being what I would most likely find labelled ‘cucumber’ on the shelves of a supermarket here in UK, and the one on the left being something I would come across either at the local farm shop or in a haul from my parents’ greenhouse during a summer glut.
And cilantro and coriander appearing together on one list? Over here in UK, both are ‘coriander’. Coriander leaves for salad, garnish and my favourite Indian and Thai dishes; coriander seeds for curry. 🇬🇧
I have to mention Emma’s shrimp. She’s made a reference to shrimp curry on a couple of her meal plans, and there are two shopping lists which contain this entry:
1lb jumbo shrimp
Sigh. Now, I’m a Brit, so obviously I read this as one jumbo shrimp which weighs a pound. And Reader, that’s one HECK of a curry.
But no: shrimp is are plural in America. If I ask for ‘shrimp’ over here I’ll get a shrimp. One shrimp, singular – and it certainly wouldn’t weigh a pound. In contrast to Emma’s, my curry would be minuscule.
Tiny.
A mini meal.
Now that’s worth an entry of its own in the Mini Book of Lists.
Love,
Rebecca
Huge thanks to and her Jim for their terrific input into this post, which became a labour of library love for all three of us! I have got to know Mary through her own Substack newsletter, , which is a delightful delivery of news about her efforts to save car-driven miles by riding her bike. You can follow Mary and Jim’s journeys by subscribing to receive Mary’s newsletters, which are all beautifully illustrated with her own artwork.
📚 Reading 📚
📚 This post by
of , in which she tracks the process of one of the very many search requests she takes on in her work as a hospital librarian, is an absolutely fascinating read!
📚 Regular readers of ‘Dear Reader, I’m Lost' will be no strangers to my ongoing light-hearted letter-writing project with fellow Brit
of . It’s his turn to reply to me on Wednesday, and you can find the archive of our chortlesome correspondence here.If you’ve enjoyed this post, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you!
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Not to be confused with my husband, who is also Jim!
The Bücherei’s four volume allowance is absolutely paltry compared to the one at Mary’s library. She tells me that each card holder can check out 50, yes 50, items at a time, for 3 weeks, and then renew each item for another 3 weeks x 2. This means that one person can have 50 items for 9 weeks, if they choose!
I was just finishing a nightly episode of Poirot when your newsy letter arrived and I thought to myself how much you and Poirot have in common. Both of you use your little grey cells to the max.
Attention to the tiniest little thing gives us such a wonderful backstory for Emma.
Rather wonderful too, that the impetus for your detective work came from Mary B. I remember reading about that little book and her comment - 'Rebecca would love this...'
Soon, Rebecca, I shall expect to see you in the most perfectly tailored grey suit, maybe with patent shoes with spats. I can't wait to see what your next moment of sleuthing reveals.
Cheers...
Taco cat goat cheese pizza!! WE LOVE this game. Oh my goodness, this is one of our card games along with Skip-Bo and UNO. This post made me smile and Pepperdine...my bother went there for Grad school. What a beautiful University. Have a great weekend Rebecca with your adventures! I believe The London Marathon is tomorrow. It's on my list. :)