Benefield: You never know what you’ll find in the pages of a book

When Friends of the Santa Rosa Libraries volunteer Dick Wilhelm was making his way through the backlog of donated books in the basement of the central branch on E Street some months ago, he came across what looked like a tome dedicated to coffee.

Among volunteers who spend hours sifting through and sorting donations, Wilhelm, with years of book buying and selling in his professional background, has earned a reputation as the go-to guy for a quick appraisal question.

At first glance, the book dedicated to coffee was unremarkable — aside from its weight.

But when they opened it, there weren’t words about beans and roasting. Instead they found a metal box with a lock.

The book was actually a fairly large safe.

“One of us joked, ‘Maybe there is $100 in there. Wouldn’t that be nice?’” Wilhelm said.

So, with approving nods from other volunteers, Wilhelm said he’d take the book/safe home and try to pick the lock.

“It didn’t take much,” he said.

Inside, Wilhelm didn’t find $100, but $1,000 in cash and a couple of receipts.

It’s not unusual for volunteers to come across personal items tucked into the pages of donated books.

Travel stubs and photographs used as bookmarks are fairly common, and sometimes a dollar bill will be wedged in there. But no one had seen anything like this: Fifty $20 bills all lined up neatly.

“It wasn’t something that anyone intended to give us,” Wilhelm said.

So the volunteers at Friends of the Libraries put on their sleuthing hats.

The search is on

It was unclear how long “For the Love of Coffee” had been sitting in the basement stacks.

After the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered the bulk of library operations, including regular book collections and sales, there was really no telling how long it had been on site.

“When we were shut down for a while, things piled up,” longtime Friends volunteer Joe Seymour said.

And no one from the library recalled any frantic donor reaching out, saying they had made a mistake.

So the volunteers decided to try to figure it out.

Basing his inquiry on a couple of receipts and papers tucked away with the cash in the safe, Wilhelm made a couple of calls to the person he believed to be the original owner.

Dead end.

He then handed the mystery off to Seymour.

Seymour, too, did some sleuthing, made some calls. Again, nothing.

Then he decided to try an online people-finder service that requires a small fee.

“I got like three or four (phone) numbers. It was the fourth number I tried,” he said.

Seymour, wanting to politely make sure he had the right person on the line, asked a couple of questions. The woman on the phone was equally reticent, likely wondering “Who is this guy, asking about a book about coffee?”

But they got to the bottom of it in short order.

It turned out the woman had been helping her mother clean house before moving out of the county, and somewhere in that process, the book, I mean, the safe, was packed up in the giveaway box.

“She didn’t have any idea that in the books they donated, there was a safe and cash,” he said.

Surprised, relieved and grateful, the woman asked Seymour to return $900 and keep the remaining $100 as a donation to Friends.

It’s a sweet sum for a volunteer group that raises funds for library programs selling books at $1 a pop.

And perhaps it’s extra enticement to lure bargain hunters to the spring book sale that begins Friday.

Like the librarian from Hidden Valley Elementary School always said, you never know what you’ll find in the pages of a book.

Finders keepers?

I reminded Wilhelm and Seymour about the old adage “finders keepers,” which is almost as old as the adage about not judging a book by its cover.

And I had to ask: Why not just keep the money and put it toward a Friends of the Libraries project?

Easy, Seymour said.

“It’s the right thing to do,” he said. “Obviously, it was done by accident. The money doesn’t belong to us. We are a group of volunteers, most of us motivated by things other than getting money out of people.”

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.