Library people love to help others, and we also like to investigate to find information. So when the Glencoe Public Library staff found a purse, hidden inside a wall of the library, they kept investigating until they found the woman who had owned it!

A dental appointment slip, a high school attended only year, and some good old-fashioned internet research helped to track down the owner – now living in California.

The story was first reported here, filled with clues the library staff had collected and asking people to contribute their help. The exciting find, along with an interview with the owner of the purse, is detailed here.

Libraries are filled with mystery and adventure!

I love books. I love maps. And I love learning about new places and people. So discovering this website, The American Experience in 737 Novels, was fantastic for me!

From the article the author wrote about her project: “At the end of this January, having heard the nation reduced to primary colors and simplistic nicknames—Red and Blue, Flyover and Rust Belt and Coastal Elite, one Friday I printed out a blank map of the United States and on the top printed Urgent Please Read: a joke. The Leader of the Free World was proud of not reading, I heard, and libraries and art were a waste of funds. Any story can be contained in 140 characters. Not fictional characters, I thought.

Flannery O’Connor spoke to me, she who went back to her home, as I had. The best American fiction has always been regional. That kind of fiction had saved my life. I began to print titles, tiny letters, onto the states I had learned through reading: Betsy-Tacy, Little Women, Sounder, Island of Blue Dolphins, Sula, Ceremony, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The latter title truly altered me as a child, when Francie takes her library books and climbs onto the fire escape, a wrought-iron structure I had to imagine.”