When I was in college a friend of mine stole (yes, I know!) an old Everyman copy of Lord Dunsany’s Book of Wonder from the library: it was a 1920’s oxblood leather-bound copy, beautiful and exciting.

I always coveted that book and remembered it.

20 years later I was telling a friend in another city about it. She managed to score a copy of it for my birthday, and gave it to me.

Less than a week later my college friend, whom I hadn’t spoken to in a decade or more, sent me the stolen copy in the mail. It was packaged carefully with a note saying he remembered how much I loved the book, saying he’d tried to give it back to the college library but they didn’t really want it as they’d moved to mostly digital systems and weren’t currently expanding their fiction collection.

So now I have two copies: they’re both my favorite.

I don't know if it's strange, but I love the way I ended up with every Vonnegut novel. I already owned about half of them when I walked into my local used book store one day. As I was perusing the shelves, I noticed the Vonnegut section was large. I pulled all the ones I didn't already own and went to buy them. The clerk told me someone had just sold them hundreds of books including all the Vonneguts. After I got home I was able to confirm that I now had all of the novels!

Someone left a copy of Verity by Colleen Hoover on my doorstep lmao. To this day I have no idea who left it or why. I still haven't read it though.

My family moved in 1983 when I was 12. My parents temporarily stacked their books on the attic stairs to be boxed up later. I was instructed not to read any until I was older. The following summer, the pile were still there, so I took one to read privately. Scared the beejesus out of me, but I couldn't talk to anyone about it without getting busted. It was the perfect age and time to read 1984

My best story is: I was living in Sweden at the time, and was visiting my bf in my own country. We went to a second hand shop we had never been before and I was obviously soon browsing the book section. I saw this little red book with big letters "I love you" on it. I jokingly told my bf he had to buy me that book because he loves me. He bought it. After buying it we saw that the book was actually in Swedish, even though Swedish is not a major language where I am from.

I still cant believe I found a Swedish book on my visit home while I was living in Sweden.

Was working in a grocery store w a typical small book section next to the magazines. One day I found a strange bookmark on the floor w an ad for a book called "Severed". I dont recall the author's name, but I thought it was odd bc we didn't have any bookmarks on display, let alone ones w ads on them. A week later I found laying on a shelf a copy of that book. It wasn't in our sales system, which meant it had no reason to be in our store. I put a dollar sticker on it and bought it for shits n giggles, but then when I read it a major part of the main character's backstory is when he is in college: the same college I was currently attending, talking about classes in buildings that I was taking at that same moment. Odd all around

The two strangest ones I can think of were fairly recent.

One was in 2019 when I was working at a local museum; one of my tasks was to sit in the ticket booth, which was generally pretty quiet and afforded the opportunity to listen to the radio or read when no one was around. One day I came to work and had forgotten my book, but was happy to find that an anonymous coworker had left a battered old paperback in the break room. I borrowed it for my shift and then returned it, but no one ever came back to claim it and no other coworker I asked knew who it belonged to, so eventually I just took it home. As it happened, it was The Way of Kings (which I had never heard of) and I really enjoyed it, but you can imagine my surprise when all of my friends started reading it and raving about it in 2022 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The second story was when I was living and working in France in the summer of that same year. I had brought a few English books with me, but quickly worked my way through them and was down to borrowing books from my friends or searching for English-language books in the local stores. The residence where we were staying had a number of mail lockers downstairs, which our group didn't use but which we had to pass by in order to leave the building. One day I was on my way out when I happened to glance at the row of lockers and noticed a book sitting on the top - it seemed like it had been left on the floor and some passerby had stuck it up there to keep it from being stepped on. I pulled it down out of curiosity and realized it was an English-language copy of Good Omens, my favourite book of all time - and it was the edition I owned, the 90s edition with the black cover. The serendipity of finding an English-language copy of my favourite book in my favourite edition in the locker room of a university residence in small-town France was too good to pass up, so I took it with me and it kept me company for the rest of my travels!

When I was a teen and still speaking to my spermdonor, I'd run out of books to read. We were about to go on a 4 hour car ride back to mum, he'd refused to let me stock up in the thrift store earlier, the divorce was going ugly - so out of spite I grabbed the biggest book from his personal shelf and shoved it into my backpack, without a look at the cover or description.
It was "The Swarm" by Frank Schätzing and it became my favourite book. He will never get it back, no matter that by now I own the ebook, the Hardcover and the new Limited Edition of the 20 year anniversary.

My house flooded in a landmark storm. After being forced to evacuate we came back to our house a few days later and sitting outside our front door was a book titled “Anything Can Happen” it’s a vintage 1940’s copy. I’ve never even heard of this book. So I dried it out, and framed it and it’s the first piece of artwork you see when you walk into my house now.

When I was a teenager my dad came home and gave me a nice hard copy of Deathly Hallows he said he found on the side of a highway. It was in great condition lol

When I was around 18, a mentor of mine was talking about the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma when I was assistant teaching for her in Pennsylvania. Over the next year or so I kept thinking about that book occasionally, but totally forgot the title, so I couldn’t buy it for myself.

Eventually, I was on a trip in Maine and went into a tiny bookstore to see if I could find something interesting to read during my stay. There were no other customers in the bookstore, it was very quiet, and the one employee was just sitting at the register.

I slowly started making my way around the perimeter of the bookstore, carefully looking at all of the titles that were sitting at eye level for me, not touching anything. About 10 minutes into my browsing, a book simply fell from an upper shelf onto my head. To this day I have no idea what could have possibly caused it to fall.

The book was The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I bought it immediately. I love it. I’ve read it several times in the many years since. Thank you, bookstore ghost!

I don't have many interesting stories like that, but the closest is probably when I was staying at a hostel in Germany years ago. A random stranger staying in the same room at the hostel gifted me a copy of Carlos Castaneda's A Separate Reality (which they had received from someone else in turn, read and enjoyed and wanted to pass it on). I'm not sure it would be as much my thing these days, but for where I was at mentally at the time I really ended up enjoying the book a lot.

I still have it and have wanted to pass it on to someone else in a similar context to keep the chain going, but haven't really found myself in a similar situation since. Maybe one day though! Maybe I'll put it in one of those Little Free Libraries with a note or something.

I found a book in a hotel lobby. It was autographed by the author. Wilbur Smith. Good read to.

A guy next to me on an airplane finished the book he was reading - Consider Phlebas. He didn't say a word to me, just put on some headphones. I didn't know what to do other than to start reading.

Now I've read a bunch of Iain Banks books. Someday I hope to do the same thing that guy did - finish a book and just hand it to some stranger.

Last year I got excited about the idea of reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces. One day I just found it among piles of books in my home. It felt like Campbell's work had materialized from nowhere... No one has ever admitted to giving it to me. And my memory isn't so bad to forget how I bought this book. Omg. :-)

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I was out fishing on the Kenai River. A storm blew in, forcing me to race back to the cabin. I was soaked through, and the place was cold and empty. Decided to go drinking, so I drove out to Sterling, the closest town about two hours away. The humidity from my clothes steamed up the windows, so I could barely see when I got to town. Pulled into a big gravel parking lot to wipe the windscreen and noticed a thrift shop nearby. I went in to look for junk, and found a box full of paperbacks for $5. I bought it, and took it back to the cabin. Among the books were something like a dozen Louis Lamour novels. I actually enjoyed them.

My wife and I were staying at a hotel that had a bookshelf in the lobby where you could borrow a book. I saw a book called "Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis. This was at least 25 years ago so I had not read any of his books yet. I liked it so much that having read half of it while we were there, I asked the hotel clerk if I could take the book when we left so I could finish it, and they graciously said yes. I have since read almost all of his books.

When I was a kid I was furniture shopping with my dad, and I noticed one of the display books that they use to decorate bookshelves and such was actually a book that I had been wanting to read. While my dad walked around the store, I sat on a couch and read a bit of the book. When it was time to leave, I noticed the book actually had a price sticker on there, probably left over from when these stores buy books in bulk. So we took it up to the register and convinced the cashier to let us buy it by ringing up an item that was a similar price. When I got home, I realized that the book had actually been signed by the author too!

I recently finished A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick

Towards the end of the book, a main character named Donna is described as having a lucky rabbit's foot attached to her purse. The rabbit's foot is only mentioned in one place in the novel.

I went on a hike directly after reading the passage mentioning the rabbit's foot. And on the middle of the trail I found, for the first time in my life, a severed rabbit's foot. A rabbit must have had a struggle with a fox or bird of prey in that exact spot.

Not exactly what you're talking about, OP, but a very notable synchronicity that I wanted to mention

Not really strange but I saw an advertisement for a book called Daemon in IIRC a Wired magazine. The synopsis sounded like something I would like, so I grabbed the book... Ended up really loving it and Daniel Suarez became my favorite author. I have enjoyed every single book he has written, though I liked his latest story (about mining asteroids) far less than any other book he has written.

I went for a walk in the park and found a copy of the goldfinch in a little box library thing. Turned out to be one of my favorites ever.

I was having dinner with a girlfriend, Anne, in the mid-1980s, and we started talking about the mutual friends we had. Anne asked if I'd ever heard of these gruesome murders back in Utah about 10 years ago, I said no and she told me that a couple we both knew were related to one of the families who lost loved ones in the crime and a book was written about the murders. This was long before the Internet and I can't recall how in the world I found a copy of the book when I didn't know the title, but I did--Victim by Gary Kinder, which has become one of my favorite true-crime books. There was an updated version after the execution of the killers. If my friend had never mentioned the crime or book to me, I never would have known.

There was this one guy I was going on a date with so did a quick google search ( safety and all that jazz). I found the book from his goodreads list lol

One recent strange book experience concerns my one-eyed ambition to purchase an Anthology of Chinese Literature. It was unbelievably expensive brand new...so I haunted 2nd hand book websites for months looking for an affordable copy. Even so it appeared that if the book was affordable it was also pretty trashed. One fine day a copy magically appeared in my search - it was in reputedly in excellent condition, at a ridiculously low price. It is a hefty tome so I knew that the cost of shipping was going to be considerable. It almost doubled the price, but I was determined to have this book so i swallowed the costs and bought it.

Once the book arrived I was delighted with its virtually new condition, and secretly quite gruntled that I had coughed up the money for it. I was even more delighted when I started leafing through the book and discovered a stash of 10 and 20 US dollar notes lying fresh and crisp throughout the pages. It precisely covered the total cost of the book. I really was meant to have it!

Went to old guys hotel room because he was late for our ride to the airport and picked up Skin Tight from his room. Favorite book ever.

Browsing ordinals.com, I see what appears to be the first book hosted on Bitcoin. At the "content" link is Mindfulness in Plain English:

https://ordinals.com/inscription/537e0c847e09c282cb1501d782255b358e90b27eb7695ca428515507145b58b1i0

I found one walking one day. It was an old book on the secrets of metaphysics, missing it's front cover.

Cool book. Written in 1953.

When I was 14, there was a bit of an issue in Beaconhous Margalla Campus, the school I went to. Specifically, that if it rained, the streets would get flooded and it would be difficult for cars to get there. So of course, one day it flooded.

I went to the IB block to avoid the rain and sat down on a chair, waiting for it to subside. And on the chair next to me was a book. Someone must have left it there for it was half way open. It was called Scorpia, of the Alex Rider series. I waited a bit, picked it up and just started reading straight from it where it had been left off.

I immediately got introduced to Julia, the main villain of the book, a smart femme fatale who I immediately got the hots for. That ignited the way to Young Adult fiction for when I was a teenager and began to read more stuff like that. The tension and subtle action left me very interested.

I finished the book, then opened it back to its halfway point. Being the good boy I was, I left it there the way I found it and went home.

One of my first date question is “what is your favorite book” and this guy did such a horrible job explaining it I had to read it for myself just so I summarize it better.

It was the Dresden Files. I love the whole series

The oddest place I purchased a book from was a garden nursery we'd gone to for dog food. We were in the UK for my sister's wedding, and were staying with the groom's parents for a few nights to get to know them. It was the only place they could get the large bag of the kind of food they bought, I think.

Anyway, there were other things sold there, which was strange to me. I found a book on researching family history online, and since I was volunteering in church archives at the time, I bought it. This was nearly 10 years ago, so it's probably wildly out of date by now, lol.

My neighborhood has several Little Free Libraries that has prompted me to read books that I probably wouldn’t have chosen from a wider selection: Push by Sapphire, It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover, Wonder by RJ Palacio and the sequel. I returned most of the books to the library when I finished, and have added some of my own books over time. Little Free Libraries are awesome and I encourage anyone to open them in their neighbor or contribute to preexisting ones!

When I was in high school, friends recommended that I listen to Circa Survive, and The Fall of Troy, amongst others. Delving into the meaning of some of their songs like The H[]ly Tape, You Got a Death Wish Johnny Truant, I found that both artists had songs about the book House of Leaves, bought it and fell in love with it.

It wasn't really strange, but one slow rainy night, I found a copy of Crime and Punishment in the break room at a place where I worked overnights when I was in my early 20s. I had always thought of that book as a big hard classic, but I was bored and started reading it. It was so good! That really started my love for classics as I hadn't read anything outside of school assignments in a while at that point. I never found out whose book it was (small workplace), and I left it in the break room for the next person.

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