Every profession has its folklore. Doctors and nurses amuse themselves with stories of patients presenting to A&E departments with foreign bodies introduced per rectum or who, trying to achieve sexual pleasure with the vacuum cleaner, have found themselves stuck. Indeed, in my medical library days, I would sometimes exploit this medical student black humour when teaching them to search Medline.
For the great profession I belong to, this folklore appears most frequently as the unusual-bookmark-found-in-a-returned-library-book-story. A recent example comes from the Brighton Argus, later taken up by the Guardian's food and drink pages, in which a rasher of bacon is supposd to have been used.
These stories circulate every so often. But in over thirty years, I have never found anything in a returned book apart from conventional bookmarks, or the impromptu ones we all use, letters, envelopes, old shopping lists and so on. I think a methodologically rigorous multi-centre study is needed to detrmine the true incidence of these cases.
