Lost and Found - Paper Edition.

It all started when we moved to Arizona and had all these bare white walls. D said - "Why don't you paint something."
I only paint in scenic design class, but I got the point. I bought a bunch of old books and magazines at thrift stores, some picture frames, and went about making collages.

Since then, I've picked up a few more books, D's made collages for his Kaibab race posters, and I've used the pictures to make my postcard entries for TransIowa.

I have a system when I get materials for collage work. Essentially, I tear the book apart by the sections its bound in - all the pages of the entire book - and then separate each page into two boxes. One box is for pages with potentially useful images. The second box is recycling. Since you can't recycle whole, bound books, this allows me to recycle everything I won't use, and makes it easier to retrieve the pages I want. And instead of a pile of books, it leaves me with a box full of pages to go through when I want to make something.

I've been going through my craft stuff, packing and reorganizing anything that I'm not liable to use before our move. I had about half a dozen books I'd gotten for collaging that I hadn't gone through yet, and thought I ought to do that, to reduce their bulk, come moving time.

When I get books from thirft stores, I don't get books that might still have some useful purpose in the world. I won't cut apart a book that has something left to give. Usually it's old encyclopedias, or TimeLife series, or other books that are way out of date, but have striking or vintage images in them. When I get home, I search for them on Amazon.com, to make sure I'm not about to cut up a rare book (I have actually bought a book for $1 and found out it was worth $20). One of the books I had sitting around was titled Lost Treasures of Europe. I'd done my usual quick search for it when I first brought it home, but didn't find anything. Today, as I was pulling sections of the book apart from it's bindings, D asked about it. It was published in 1946 - and is a collection of some 450 pictures of buildings that were destroyed in World War II. The book's editors compiled a list of all the major architectural treasures that were damaged in Europe, and published images of them, taken prior to the war, in this volume (along with a few "after" shots).

My curiosity raised, I searched for the book again. It sells for somewhere between $20-$40... mine was in perfect condition... before I pulled it to pieces!!! Distressed that'd I'd just killed a fairly rare and historic volume, but realizing there was nothing much I could do, I continued hacking it to pieces. Half way through I found a small piece of paper tucked between two pages (the above and below photos).

It is an absolutely PERFECT condition 5 Mark note, issued from Berlin in August of 1917, for use as a small denomination loan against commodities, in the German occupied territories, during World War I. Technically, it was not legal tender, but was used as such during the period (isn't the information you can find on the internet in 10 minutes amazing???).

This one doesn't so much as have a corner turned. It could not possibly have circulated - ever. I thought it couldn't be real when I first saw it, and can't really be certain that it is, it's too perfect. Except for the fact that no one would ever want to produce a counterfeit, as a search of German-language eBay turns up a value of about $2 US.