The things one finds in old books ...

 Despite still feeling a bit raw after Lucy's passing, I had my usual Friday morning cataloguing session at the Athenaeum.

Nothing of great interest, some 1940s and fifties bodice rippers, and quite a bit of Dickens.

Some of the Dickens editions are quite old, one is a Chapman and Hall edition of Little Dorrit dating to 1861, and others look to be equally old, and form part of the same series, but have irritatingly lost their title pages.

Others date from the 1930s and seem to have been bought deliberately to replace earlier copies which have worn out beyond repair.

However, the old editions were still in use until the closure of the Athenaeum as a library in the early 1970s

An old Melbourne tram ticket used as a bookmark, and we can date it to sometime between 1966 when Australia abandoned the old British £sd system for the rather more prosaic dollars and cents we use today, and 1972 when the Athenaeum ceased to function as the village library.

Another nice little example of using ephemera to date when an item was last used ...