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