WILLIAM POOLE on errr...actually I am not sure. Just read it yourself

Now and then I find things in books that are not really supposed to be there.

The most common sight in Oxford is the forgotten order slip in a book from the stacks of the Bodleian, abandoned to suffocate over the decades. Many of these bear now noted names, often the last surviving evidence of intellectual activity amongst Oxford’s celebrity zombies.

Stranger things are found in books. In old manuscripts I often encounter flattened flowers. As a young tutor at Christ Church, the philosopher John Locke pressed his flowers between his pupils’ tutorial exercises, an endearing quirk for an otherwise refrigerated fish of a man, and this odd combination of flower-graveyard-cum-prehistoric-essay-morgue survives among Locke’s manuscripts here today.

It is said that in Cambridge the great classical scholar Porson absent-mindedly bookmarked with sandwiches, now thin green wafers, but I have neither seen nor tasted one. I have, however, licked several Oxford manuscripts and printed books over the years to test stains — for strictly scholarly purposes. I’ve not had the opportunity to abuse first folios of Shakespeare in this manner, but these occasionally bear rusty silhouettes in the outlines of spectacles or scissors.

The great scholar John Selden lost some spectacles this way, and when his books arrived in the Bodleian after his death in the late 1650s, a pair resurfaced, whereupon the librarian gallantly presented them to that grumpy Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood, who cherished them ever after. Henry VIII, in passing, was another myopial who frequently left his specs in books.

My grandfather looted — family myth — a book in Second World War Italy; it’s now my oldest book, a gospel harmony written by the Croatian humanist Marko Marulic, published in Venice in 1516. I was standing at my college bar reading it a few years ago when a small piece of paper fell out: it was retrieved and handed to me, and after a few bleary moments I saw to my utter astonishment that it was a 16th-century Latin handwritten list of the proper penances for sex before Mass.

These things keep happening to me. When I was a doctoral student I was down in the stacks of the theology faculty library, browsing some volumes of those original zombies, the Church Fathers. Opening one, a booty of Polaroids spilled on to my lap, snapped by some budding young ecclesiastic of his temporarily willing lady, as she posed demurely, guarding her modesty with only his teddy bear and their shared religious conviction.

The Polaroids lay either in an old translation of Irenaeus, a surprisingly amiable church father who argued that Adam and Eve had not been so wicked after all; or otherwise in the works of that truly nasty African father Tertullian, who instead insisted on the crushing guilt of our shared original sin.

I was very interested in sin back in those days, and how to share it with as many like-minded students as possible. So, yes: I quietly replaced the photos back inside the book for posterity to share. Now you may search for them, if the wonks have not shut down that library too. Her hair was flaming ginger; her teddy bear bright orange...