Found! Crispy Bacon in a Book . . .

Henry Alford (in The New York Times):

We may never fully understand what prompts people to leave unusual objects inside books. I speak of the slice of fried bacon that the novelist Reynolds Price once found nestled within the pages of a volume in the Duke University library. I speak of the letter that ran: “Do not write to me as Gail Edwards. They know me as Andrea Smith here,” which the playwright Mark O’Donnell found some years ago in a used paperback. I speak of any of those bizarre objects — scissors, a used Q-tip, a bullet, a baby’s tooth, drugs, pornography, and 40 $1,000 bills — that have been discovered by the employees of secondhand bookstores . . .

What's the most unusual item you've found in a used book? Me? It's a toss-up between a Tarot card (The Hanged Man) in a copy of Rousseau's Confessions and an unpackaged but, mercifully, unused condom (in The Joy of Cooking. Hot stuff. Latex. Nice neon pink colour. A little tip on the end of it). The most conundrifying dedication? For My Darling Husband, Ligt [sic] of My Life. Happy Birthday! Love, Bunnykins . . . (The book? Fifty Ways to Leave Your Mother.)