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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday August 02 2018, @03:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the ex-libris dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In December 2014, Max Brown was picking through an Incline Village dumpster for a community service project when a collection of 1980s cassettes caught his eye. Fancying himself a collector, he pulled them out and inspected them.

Then he noticed the substantial pile of worn books buried beneath them.

Then it started raining.

Quickly, Brown grabbed about 15, all he could carry, and left, narrowly avoiding the snowstorm that was to blanket the area that night and ruin the books remaining in the dumpster.

It wasn't until six months had passed that Brown offhandedly bent back the cover of one of the books and saw "from the library of Thomas Jefferson" inscribed on the open page.

Upon reading those six words, Brown became a detective, beginning an archival search for answers that would span three years of his life, 220 years of the country's, and connect the hands of an American founding father to his own.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday August 02 2018, @08:23PM (2 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday August 02 2018, @08:23PM (#716430) Journal

    You know, on a second read, there are some weird things about all this. The two specific books he claims were known to be in Jefferson's possession were apparently already sold on eBay months before he figured out they really belonged to Jefferson. So unless someone tracks down this buyer, we can't actually verify the claims here.

    Initially, I thought TFA said that he returned some other Jeffersonian books to the Kellogg family descendants, but on a re-read, I'm not sure if he did or if he just returned photo albums to them. (The text is unclear.) I assumed there were more of Jefferson's books that could be examined, but perhaps they were all sold on eBay.

    Which isn't exactly suspicious, but it makes this guy's claims much more difficult to verify. So I would say I'm a little more skeptical now, but it still seems a pretty elaborate hoax... and for what?

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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday August 02 2018, @08:25PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday August 02 2018, @08:25PM (#716431) Journal

    (Sorry -- wish for an edit button again. In the last couple sentences I didn't mean to imply that I think this is a hoax -- I still don't. But I'm slightly more skeptical enough to say it would be good to verify his claims further.)

  • (Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Friday August 03 2018, @02:54PM

    by DavePolaschek (6129) on Friday August 03 2018, @02:54PM (#716730) Homepage Journal

    The way I read one of the other stories about this same thing was that he was pretty sure the books were old and worth something, but sold them on eBay because he needed cash, THEN realized that it was Kellogg family albums he had and that the books he'd sold on eBay would have been worth a lot more with a verifiable provenance, which he probably could come up with now, since the Kelloggs had owned the books in question, said "D'Ohh!" and then contacted the news media.

    So yeah, he figured it out after having sold the books, presumably for a lot less than he could have if he had put the pieces together sooner.